Comment 35 for bug 33002

If this amateur UI nerd can throw into the fray...

Part of the problem is the decision to make a switch to a full dialog from a pulldown menu. Presumably this is inspired by a desire for consistency with Windows.

The irony is, within the various Gnome metaphors, what's needed is an inverse of the Windows 'Start' menu -- that is, a rapidly-accessed 'Exit' menu that details all the various ways to depart a session.

There's been some haphazard rearranging of these features in recent GUIs; first the Mac had its shutdown item buried in a menu; some subset of followon GUIs moved it to a more-easily-located dedicated widget when 'docks' and 'launchers' became popular.

Then came Windows 9x, with the Start menu, OS X with the tweak in concept for their Apple menu, and fast-user-switching on both of the big remaining personal computing platforms standardizing on the upper-right corner.

...

What I see is the germ of a pretty damn good idea here; the 'exit' icon, while initially unfamiliar (as hieroglyphs always are), is an appropriate categorization for all these 'You are about to invoke a dramatic switch in mode' options. Why have FUS in one widget and logout and shutdown buried elsewhere, when they're all related to session management and the user may still be decision-making while invoking the menu or dialog? Also, for whatever weird confluence of reasons, the positional consistency for 'close button' has moved from upper left to upper right in the past decade, so there's some familiarity for the average MS migrant there.

That's the good part. The bad part is making it a full blocking dialog when it doesn't deserve to be. A dropdown combining the FUS list with shutdown and logout options is much more easily dismissed (by 'clicking off' to change focus) when invoked accidentally, no 'Cancel' or 'exit' item needed, and no consideration of focus required. Only destructive selections (a full logout or shutdown) then deserve a blocking confirmation dialog when selected to prove the user's really sure.

This probably amounts to wishlisting a *third* rewrite of the whole functionality; I haven't seen Gnome's official approach yet, and bumped into Ubuntu's current direction in the past day or two. I can also appreciate that the existing approach is probably guaranteed to survive across GNOME/KDE/XFCE distributions, while a panel applet that does more of the heavy lifting itself rather than invoking another X client might not, but such is life.

(Off-topic, but when it comes to panel layout and use of screen corners, I like to put the window list applet in the top left. This bumps the Applications menu out of that spot, but serves my need for OS/2 Warpcenter nostalgia and is a bit more convenient than strafing desktops or sliding along the Windows-style switcher. The changing icon also provides a cute and consistently-placed reminder of what has focus without having to visually interpret a messy desktop. Since 'preferred' applications wind up with their own launcher icons anyway, far from screen corners, anyone higher-up want to try this for a while and decide if it's worth considering as a basic UI feature?)