Shall we hide the GUI for Hibernate in Natty?

[Marc Deslauriers]

On Mon, 2011-01-31 at 11:04 -0800, Rick Spencer wrote:
> The reasoning for hiding Hibernate includes:
> 1. It doesn't work well for many users on many machines.
> 2. It's very slow.
> 3. It's not as useful because users can just suspend.
> 4. The difference between hibernate and suspend is confusing.
> 5. There is a lot of work involved with verifying that Hibernates works
> and fixing bugs to ensure that it works. This work is not always
> completed, and the work that does get done can be channeled to other
> useful areas. (In other words, fewer bugs through fewer features to
> support).

Is there any data that suggests hibernate fails more often than suspend?
I was under the impression that both would be broken when laptops
weren't supported properly.

I agree that having both suspend and hibernate is confusing to people.
The only reason I often hibernate is when I know I won't be using my
laptop for a while and am paranoid that I'll run out of battery while
suspended.

I haven't actually tried this in a long time, but what happens with
current Ubuntu when the battery drains out while suspended? Does the
laptop wake up and enter hibernation to prevent data loss? Will the
removal of hibernation support from the kernel result in data loss when
battery runs out during suspend? I think there's a difference between
removing the hibernate button and removing hibernate completely if
that's the case.

The main use case of hibernation vs. shutting down for me is when I need
to leave quickly and don't want to spend time going through all my open
windows to see if I have unsaved data, etc...in this use case, fast boot
is not a substitute for working suspend/hibernation.

Marc.