Press power button twice to shut down?

Solarmass

I just prefer to shoutdown PC from the DE menu.

brent

Solarmass I prefer the one-click celtic magic widget in repo.
mike-ward aren't all hard boots/shutdowns/reboots rough on hardware to begin with? despite solus (or other) furnishing a fast button shut-down? dunno. one of those 'conventional wisdom' things I've been wrong about before

tomscharbach

mike-ward Maybe I'm an outlier here but since I turn the appliance (a.k.a. computer) on with the power button doesn't it make sense that I should turn it off with the power button? My coffee maker works that way.

I have yet to see an OS (Windows or Linux) that doesn't allow the user to set the power button to "Shut Down" when pressed. The setting is usually in "Power" or "Power Management" or similar. Pick the action you want (do nothing, sleep, hibernate, shut down, etc.) and go with it. If you select shut down, the computer will behave like your coffee maker

That's not, however, what your OP requested. You requested a two-stage shut down, where pressing the power button once brought up a menu but pressing it twice shut down the computer. I've never seen that in any OS, or on coffee makers, for that matter.

brent [A]ren't all hard boots/shutdowns/reboots rough on hardware to begin with?

By "hard boots/shutdowns/reboots" I assume that you mean something like what happens when you press-and-hold the power button for a while, abruptly shutting down the OS and the computer. I don't think that is harmful to the hardware, but it can sure screw up an OS because the OS did not shut down in an orderly fashion.

Normal power button boots/shutdowns/reboots (setting the power button action through the OS) do whatever in an orderly fashion, just as if you had clicked the selection through the OS. No harm, no foul.

mike-ward

Maybe I'm an outlier here but since I turn the appliance (a.k.a. computer) on with the power button doesn't it make sense that I should turn it off with the power button? My coffee maker works that way.

EbonJaeger

A coffee maker shutting down won't cause people to lose work if the power button gets hit accidentally. With computers, having confirmation whenever an action happens that might cause loss of information is generally considered a good thing.

tomscharbach

EbonJaeger A coffee maker shutting down won't cause people to lose work if the power button gets hit accidentally.

Yup. I set my power button to "Do Nothing" for that reason. But I agree with you about a confirmation message.

mike-ward

EbonJaeger Ug, I wish people would actually read the feature idea before responding.

The feature clearly says press the power button a second time after the confirmation dialog appears.

And yes, I know a coffee maker is not a computer. Thought I was dealing with adults here.

I give up.

elfprince

tomscharbach What do you do when your computer freezes, for any reason? Once in a while, my Solus gets frozen and the only way I can move on is to press and hold the power button for a shutdown.
In your case, the power button is set to do nothing. Do you just pull the physical plug when you need to?

brent

mike-ward Ug, I wish people would actually read the feature idea before responding.

The feature clearly says press the power button a second time after the confirmation dialog appears.

And yes, I know a coffee maker is not a computer. Thought I was dealing with adults here.

As a person attempting to address your proposal, I am sorry I did fail to ascend to the level of maturity and intelligence needed to speak to one as exalted as yourself. Please accept my personal apology.
/s

mike-ward

elfprince Don't know this for a fact but I suspect even with the power button set to do nothing, holding it for 5 seconds will force a reboot. Probably a firmware thing.

brent

elfprince when os/software freezes due to some resource drain there is no way around a hard reboot. done plenty of them.

tomscharbach

elfprince What do you do when your computer freezes, for any reason? Once in a while, my Solus gets frozen and the only way I can move on is to press and hold the power button for a shutdown.
In your case, the power button is set to do nothing. Do you just pull the physical plug when you need to?

Setting the power button to "Do Nothing" does not change the behavior of "press-and-hold" power button behavior. The power button settings are OS-determined. Power button "press-and-hold" operates from BIOS.

elfprince

mike-ward Certainly hope so! 😆

Solarmass

brent when os/software freezes due to some resource drain there is no way around a hard reboot. done plenty of them.

There is reisub sequence:

Of all command key sequences, reisub is probably the most famous. To better remember this sequence, it is often used as an acronym for “raising elephants is so utterly boring”. What does this sequence accomplishes? Holding alt+sysrq key, we proceed pressing the command keys in sequence, and this is what happens:

First of all r switches the keyboard from raw to XLATE mode, then, e sends a SIGTERM signal to all processes, so that they can be closed in a graceful way if possibile. After that we send a SIGKILL signal by pressing i, to terminate remaining process which didn’t respond to the previous signal. With s we try to sync all mounted filesystems and flush all changes from cache to the disk immediately. By using u we remount all filesystems in read only mode, and finally by pressing b, we perform a system reboot.

The reisub sequence can be used in certain situations when the system becomes very unresponsive, and other solutions are not enough to fix things. The command keys composing this sequence are, however, only a subset of the available ones: for a complete list, you can take a look at the SysRq kernel documentation.

https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-enable-all-sysrq-functions-on-linux

WetGeek

brent when os/software freezes due to some resource drain there is no way around a hard reboot. done plenty of them

That's the only time I do an impolite restart. Fortunately, ex4 is a journaling file system, so unless something's really wrong, no harm is done.

mike-ward

brent What part of your response actually addressed my proposal?

For reference, please see the first post in this thread.

brent

mike-ward [shrugs shoulder emoji here] I thought I discussed the feasibility, if not, again I apologize.

brent

WetGeek good to know

tomscharbach

brent good to know

Both NTFS (Windows) and EXT4 (Linux) journal, which greatly increases the chances of a self-healing successful boot after press-and-hold shutdown. In the old days, press-and-hold shutdown created a nightmare as often as not. In rare cases, data loss still occurs when the system crashes or loses power before changes are written to the disk. However, that is rare and for the last 25-30 years systems routinely power up again without issue, although you will probably notice that boot time is longer as the OS sets itself up after a press-and-hold. Press-and-hold remains a last resort, to be used only when nothing else works.

I avoid using the power button at all to shut down. I was trained 40-odd years ago to proceed with an orderly shutdown, closing all apps and using the OS to shut down. In my head, the power button has a big red "NO" on it when it comes to shutting down a computer. That -- and the risk of accidental shutdown -- are why I set the power button to "Do Nothing" on all my computers. My 2 cents.

brent

tomscharbach between you an @Solarmass I feel I got 3 college credits...it's good to know there's not a lot of residual damage...press and hold the only option in some scenarios though...and i set my own Solus power button to do nothing when pressed as well

edit: "I avoid using the power button at all to shut down" Me too, I think it's been years since I've tried that.

Solarmass

tomscharbach I avoid using the power button at all to shut down.

🍻️🍻️

I recently started to avoid using the power button to power ON my PC! 😆

I wonder how many linux people just use a Terminal to poweroff PC 🤔️

WetGeek

tomscharbach orderly shutdown, closing all apps and using the OS to shut down

I'm all for the orderly shutdown, using the power icon in the Plasma menu. But Plasma offers the option to start the next session with the applications that were running in the previous session, so I don't shut those down before I do the orderly (a.k.a. polite) shutdown.

And the polite shutdown sends a message to each running app telling it to shutdown, so it has a chance to do that properly.

For newer Plasma users, note that this feature isn't turned on by default. In the System Settings, the Startup and Shutdown sub-menu makes this feature available. When turned on, Plasma even researts each application in its original workspace when you reboot. Strangely, Vivaldi is the only app that doesn't restart automatically for me.

tomscharbach

brent "I avoid using the power button at all to shut down" Me too, I think it's been years since I've tried that.

It just makes sense to close apps and then shut down through the OS because an OS shutdown allows the OS to journal, shut down processes and services, save data, and otherwise shut down in an orderly way. Although consumer-level operating systems, as well as desktops and laptops, are designed to be more-or-less idiot proof, why push it? The old ways are sometimes the best ways.

Having said that, I don't see any problem with idea of having the power button open a menu (perhaps shutdown/restart/sleep/hibernate), keeping control of the shutdown process within the operating system. I wouldn't use it, but it is better than nothing.