On Jan 28, 2007, at 6:10 PM, DJA wrote:
Besides. Just hitting the physical power button is a known Bad Thing (tm) to do to a running OS like Windows. If anything, M$ should make such a choice much more forgiving (as is a journaling file system, maybe?). Closing the lid is not universally considered an act of shutting the system down. Maybe the author wants it to be. I, for one, don't. Maybe I've got an overactive manic gene or something, but I don't experience any loss of happiness when exercising any of my options in this area.
Actually, I've found, on just about any computer built in the last 5 years or so, that just hitting the power button Just Works (TM), because of the same ACPI stuff you mentioned earlier in your mail. Quite happily, all of the desktop or notebook computers I have to deal with on a daily basis will do the right thing when I hit the power button.
Well, or almost the "right" thing, for my particular definition of "right". "Right", for me, is "pop up a dialog asking if you really want to shut down." My Macs and Windows systems do this perfectly, but Linux (Ubuntu in this case) just starts shutting down (equivalent of 'shutdown -h now'). This is still much better than simply powering itself off, though.
Yes, Joel did go a little overboard; Even my mom knows that she has the option of shutting the lid if she'll be away from her notebook for a little while, or pressing the power button and confirming that she wants to shut down to put it away. The other options are there, should she need them, but she doesn't have to care since she doesn't need them.
Gregory -- Gregory K. Ruiz-Ade <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> OpenPGP Key ID: EAF4844B keyserver: pgpkeys.mit.edu -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
