Comment 60 for bug 861171

I'd say go for your Alt A, Robert, and I agree that an authentication dialogue is better than the vanilla conf dialogue exactly like you say; This will definitely make the general "wife" or "brother" pause to think 3 seconds before shutting down & killing other sessions.

I guess that power button is accessable to the common user in about 98% of all use cases, and therefore I also agree that any user should be able to perform a proper shutdown if he/she is working locally (either from greeter or from session). HOWEVER, this makes it VERY important to keep in mind what Matthew says about really being pushy on the user...really trying to make him understand that this is serious business. (This learning also comes from Windows where quite a few of us have lost work due to the fact that wife/brother actually shut down the computer without even thinking about other users. Well...maybe not THAT many of us, since I guess Windows in general is considered a 1 user system in more cases than unix.)

In the mean time (work-around):
For anyone with slight tech knowledge (like myself, and I emphasise slight in this sentence), they are likely to have sudo permissions and be able to perform 'shutdown now' from a terminal anyway.

Thanks a lot to you guys in the team who actually FIX things for all of us others who're just whining!!

:-) alfs