GNOME desktop has been completely revamped in its new avatar, the GNOME 3. All the changes till now have made it more usable than before. I’m quite liking the new desktop but there is one thing that annoys me big time. Where is the shutdown button? I couldn’t find it anywhere. Is there any keyboard shortcut or mouse gesture to shutdown the desktop? I quite literally, shutdown my computer from the virtual consoles by issuing an ‘init 0’ command for some instances till I figured out the shutdown button is indeed present but not visible(as it was in testing releases of GNOME 3).

To shutdown the computer when using GNOME 3, you need to click on your user-name in the far right top corner of your screen. Upon clicking you’ll get the regular drop-down menu, with the last option as ‘Suspend’. Now press the ‘Alt’ key on the keyboard & keep it pressed and voila the ‘Suspend’ option magically turns into ‘Power Off…’. Upon clicking, you’ll get to choose between a system restart & shutdown.

There you have it. I don’t know why the GNOME team decided to make it so mysterious. GNOME has always been a user-friendly desktop environment but such moves may make its users turn to other alternatives. Already some users have expressed their annoyance to the new changes of the GNOME 3.