[Improvement Request] Prettier Shutdown

[Alex Baggott]

Currently, notify-osd instances and open windows get mangled on Log Out/Shutdown/Restart. Also, the user isn't prompted to save and close programs when this happens. Speaking as an OED selling machines which run 14.04 LTS, it would be much nicer to have any notify-osd messages disappear/fade out and for users to be prompted by their open programs before seeing them close.

Perhaps something of this nature could be run before Unity exits:

start-stop-daemon --stop --name notify-osd
WIN_IDs=$(wmctrl -l | awk '!/unity/ && !/Desktop/ && !/Hud/ && !/XdndCollectionWindowImp/ {print $1}')
for i in $WIN_IDs; do
 wmctrl -ic "$i"
done
while [ -n "$WIN_IDs" ]; do
 sleep 0.1
WIN_IDs=$(wmctrl -l | awk '!/unity/ && !/Desktop/ && !/Hud/ && !/XdndCollectionWindowImp/ {print $1}')
done

A desirable additional feature would be for the desktop to exit in a nice fade out (or other) effect.

I'm not a developer and I lack the skills to implement this, despite my efforts to make a hack/workaround, so would anyone be interested in implementing something like this?

[Marco Trevisan (Treviño) (3v1n0)]

If you have some unsaved documets (for example with gedit), the logout dialog will prompt that to you, but to have more programs to support this, they need to include Gnome Session support.

Unfortunately X doesn't allow us to do a nice fading-out log out, so we can't do it.

We might fade the shell and windows out, but still there will be some garbage on shutdown (as compiz get killed and windows might be shown again).

[Alex Baggott (alex-baggott)]

Forgive any ignorance, but since the suggested wmctrl loop causes each open window to prompt the user to close it, wouldn't this bypass the Gnome Session issue? With all windows closed, the shell could then fade out.

This seems like it would be good improvement.