Why Restart & Shutdown Buttons on login screen

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 08:23 -0600, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-04-25 at 15:47 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> 
> > > I find these buttons very useful. My machine double boots. Sometimes I
> > > make a mistake  and allow the machine to boot to the wrong OS. Using
> > > these buttons I can correct the situation. Other times I boot my machine
> > > and I realize before I login that I really wanted to shutdown the
> > > machine.
> > 
> > "your" machine => single-user environment.
> > 
> > > But I confused by your question. How does this extra functionality hurt
> > > you or anyone else?
> > Do you expect arbitrary users to switch off an unattended ("free")
> > machine in a lab's or an office's machine pool, a classical workstation
> > scenario?
> 
> Bottom line answer to this is emphatically YES ABSOLUTELY! If it's a
> kiosk type machine.
Workstation != kiosk.

A workstation is being shared amongst several users, users who aren't
necessarily logged into the console.
 
>  In fact, given today's energy costs, I actually
> would hope that someone would be savvy enough to do this at the end of
> the day. There is absolutely no risk in powering such a system down as
> the next user would only need to power the thing back up.

To shutdown a machine, the "instance/authority" shutting down a machine
would have to know that nobody is wanting to use a machine.

> My home computer has multiple user accounts
This is a different scenario than what I am talking about.

> If you truly have a multi-user environment - and multi-user means that
> more than 1 person is logged onto the machine simultaneously - then you
> have a different scenario, and in this case, the system essentially is a
> server.
Well, any workstation and any Linux system to some extend is a server :)

> > Q: How to disable these buttons permanently?
> 
> I'm not certain, however I would be hesitant to do this.

Why? This is the classical workstation-pool scenario. A set of machines
being up around the clock and not supposed to be switched off.

Ralf