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Originally created by Tails on #5322 (Redmine)

We’ve been asked numerous times to make the emergency shutdown button a bit less dangerous, especially since it’s close to the "Close this window" button.

Many solutions were proposed, here’s the one we will implement:

Let’s leave this button at the same top-right place; clicking it should open a dropdown menu with three entries:

• Lock screen (requires the addition of the package xscreensaver )
• Shutdown immediately
• Reboot immediately

This way:

• it looks like the GNOME3 top-right menu
• it’s still pretty fast to use in emergency situations
• reboot comes back
• much less dangerous

Implementation

A simple GNOME applet for this has been developed in the branch feature/better_power_off_button. There are some issues:

Issues to be solved or discussed.

The remaining issues are either pedantic to the point of irrelevance, or things we will know if we need to do once we have some user feedback. New tickets can be opened if that happens.

• For the "Lock screen" action we need to implement screen locker. This branch currently implements using the "Password-less amnesia account" approach, which turned out to be problematic (see ticket).
• Translations work for the applet (i.e. its action menu entries) but I don’t know (I haven’t even investigated) how to make its bonobo server file translatable. That would make the strings shown in the applet list (as seen via "Add to panel" for instance) translatable. IMHO this isn’t important and I’d rather not waste my energy on it. What do you think?
• Since "Shutdown Immediately" is right below "Lock Screen" in the menu, I assume users could miss-click it pretty easily. Perhaps making the menu entries larger and/or putting separators between them could help prevent that.
• The icon it currently uses for "Reboot Immediately" is "gtk-refresh". It seems like the default GNOME theme doesn’t have a dedicated icon for reboot. We could use the same icon as for "Shutdown Immediately" but I’d rather have something distinct.