Gnome 3.0 UI – fail!

13. March 2011

Actually I didn’t mean to blog about that issue because I felt discussing things in bug reports is more useful but today it was just too much annoyance. Comments are disable anyway.

In GNOME 3.0 there is no obvious UI how to shutdown your system. All that is available is “Suspend” and “Log out”. “Shutdown” is only available when you hold the “Alt” (or “Meta”) key down which isn’t an obvious user interaction. If you log off there is a chance that you find that you can shutdown within the gdm screen but people using auto-login aren’t very familiar with that screen I guess.

So far, I kind of understood that the designer think that for many devices the power-down button actually put them in a kind of standby-mode, like TVs. That is actually true for the buttons on the remote controls, not for the buttons on the device itself.

However, I assumed that pressing the “Power” button on my laptop would actually show me the power off dialog but instead it suspends the system. This is wrong in two ways:

* Power is the button to switch on/off any device. It switches off my mobile phone, my TV and the even dish washer.
* There is a suspend button on this notebook so this is duplicating and misleading

Of course, I might be less annoyed if suspend (or more precisely wake-up) would actually work