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by jader201·14y ago·view on hn ↗
> Here's another crazy idea for shutting down your PC or Laptop - Press the Power Button.

You can thank Windows for this. Back in the day when we went from DOS to Windows, this notion of a "proper shutdown" was introduced, and God forbid you press the power button, or bad things would happen.

I'm not positive Windows was the first to do this, but I think it's safe to say it was the one that started this habit for most people.

And now, it has became so engraved in our brain that it's nearly impossible to un-train. I to this day never use the power button on any device to shut it down out of uncertainty that I don't know what will happen[1] if I do.

[1]http://www.aeropause.com/wordpress/archives/images/2008/11/a...

17 comments
In the very rare cases I need to reboot or shut down my macbook, I'll press the power button: it pops up a standard 4-button dialog with [Restart] on [SPC] and [Shutdown] on [Return]. Also available are [Sleep] and [Cancel] (on [Esc]).

Way faster than going through the Apple menu.

Was that an actual 'closes circuit when depressed' button or was it a switch? Either way, flipping a power switch unexpectedly is bad. Lots of video game consoles had power switches. You shouldn't flip the power switch on a modern computer either. But giving the power button a press is safe in every single device I own or am aware of.
I think ATX changed from a switch to a button, and ACPI added OS support for intercepting it.
Before ACPI there was APM that allowed catching it as well.
Eeh, I don't know, kids today. Back in my day, when I was young (and it weren't even that long ago neither), the hallmark of a "proper" computer was that you couldn't just switch it off...
All modern computers with ACPI should properly send the power button click to the OS (long press does the traditional hardware shutdown)
FYI over at Reddit http://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ysty8/windows_8_sh...

It seems shutting down just "mini hibernates" it does not shutdown Windows 8, you need to choose restart when installing updates.

Interesting point you picked out - I didn't think of doing this either, in my tests with 8 I was annoyed at how difficult it was to get to a shutdown menu.

I think the real trial for the OS will be whether people will be able to re-learn these basic metaphors that Windows has fostered up until this release. I think we'll see something very interesting happen with the consumer uptake in the short-run, but in the long run I feel they've made some actual forward-thinking decisions.

Maybe, after this change (and ones like it) has been accepted for a few years, people won't be terrified of their power buttons and flag keys anymore.

I use power buttons all the time and never had any serious, or maybe just any, problem with it whatsoever. It also makes 100% sense: press button to power on, press button again to power off. Just like in the analog days.
I miss the Turbo button on my 286.
Moreover, I'm pretty sure he means only the smart power button on the machine itself as opposed to the switch on the power strip beside the machine. I assume that flipping that would still do Bad Things. And so the situation is still a bit confusing. Uh and you don't want to hold smart power button down too long either... See, it's really easy and simple to understand...
Kind of like how it took months before I stopped cringing every time I pressed Ctrl-Alt-Delete just to log in.
That's a security mechanism. The idea being that malware can impersonate the login dialogue, but they cannot capture Ctrl-Alt-Delete as that is trapped deep in ring 0, in the kernel, beyond the reach of your average keyboard hook. Thus, Ctrl-Alt-Delete is there to ensure you are indeed giving your credentials to the real McCoy.
And whatever you do, don't hold the power button down for [random amount of time][1] just because Scott said it was safe to start using it for a regular shutdown again!

[1] where random amount of time is best-guess 'more than 5 seconds', but depends on hardware implementation and varies widely in practice

It's too much trouble to lift your hand to press the power button.

In Ubuntu I do: <Super Key> + <Space Bar>, type "SHU" and press enter.

I love Gnome-Do. (Of course not limited to Ubuntu. You have Launchy for windows and spotlilght(?) for mac.)

You don't need Gnome-Do when running in Unity, right?
I would think so. I've just been using gnome-do for a long time before unity came along, so gnome-classic + gnome-do is all I need. :)
The AmigaOS, since the beginning, had no problem to deal with power off-s. That's only when I arrived on the PC that I felt very strange to have to do a software shut down instead of pressing a hardware button. Nonsense.
This is not exactly true. It's true that you wouldn't break your OS install by switching power off at random times, but if you had something in the middle of writing a file to disk, then it was sure as hell going to leave that file half written.

For sure, there was no "software shut down", but the issue with that was it put the burden on the user to be careful about when they shut it down if they were saving stuff to disk. The floppy and hard drive lights (if you had one!) were there, and as long as you trained yourself to not turn it off while those lights were on, you would probably be fine, but it was far from a sure thing.

I adored the Amiga, and it was way ahead of its time in a whole lot of ways, both software and hardware, but this wasn't really one of them.

Because hard drives are slow and people want fast computers, writes are buffered, sometimes quite a lot.

This will improve immensely when we all use SSDs.

I seem to recall running a PARK program to park the drive heads before turning off the power, even in the DOS days.
Linux did "proper shutdown" type stuff, though for a long time it couldn't actually kill the power.

Unicies were probably similar.

for a hone machine where the tower is out ofthe way, I don't like poking around under the desk to find the button. start the machine with mouse click or slam a key, and sleep with power button on keyboard.