I’m sure there’s a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between 9, count them, 9 options: 2 icons and 7 menu items. The 2 icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to. On many laptops, there are also 4 FN+Key combinations to power off, hibernate, sleep, etc. That brings us up to 13 choices, and, oh, yeah, there’s an on-off button, 14, and you can close the lid, 15. A total of 15 different ways to shut down a laptop that you’re expected to choose from.

joel nails it. both linux on the desktop and windows try to make things “configurable” to cater to everyone. blech.

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