Shall we hide the GUI for Hibernate in Natty?

[Rick Spencer]

Hello all,

This email is to get some feedback and discussion about an idea under
consideration for Ubuntu in Natty.

Natty is currently NOT showing the Hibernate option in the list of
shutdown choices. This is currently an experiment, but I thought it
might be worth discussing the pros and cons on these lists as well.

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).

However, Hibernate works well for some users, so this will be a painful
regression[1].

Please note that currently:
1. No decision has been taken, it's just an experiment and is very open
to discussion at this point.
2. The feature is hidden in the UI, but can be turned back on by
tweaking,
/var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/10-vendor.d/com.ubuntu.desktop.pkla
3. The desktop team decided that session saving (in Gnome) is
unsalvagable, so removing hibernate would mean that there is no way to
save state across powerdowns/powerups.[2]

So, thoughts, discussion, feedback, options, suggestions, rants, raves,
etc... ?

Cheers, Rick

[1] https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/710796
[2]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-January/002734.html