KDE - The Long Shutdown

As the Alice Cooper song goes "It's the little things that drive you wild," and that is certainly true with KDE4.

KDE4 has a lot of good things going for it. It looks very nice, it is easy to configure, the widgets work well, and even though it's not quite finished what is there tends to be an improvement over KDE3.

There is one thing that gets right up my nose though, and that is the shut down options. Allow me to walk you through the shutdown routine.

Step 1: Click on the "K" button to open the menu
Step 2: Click on the "Leave" tab
Step 3: Click on "Shutdown"
Step 4: Click on "Turn off the computer"

At this point the computer will actually shut down. That's a lot of steps for a simple task. The really annoying thing is that you actually get asked the same questions twice, so after you choose "Shutdown" from Step 3 (as opposed to "Log out" and "Reboot") you get presented with the same set of options again, but worded slightly differently.

Look, if I didn't want to shut the damn thing down I wouldn't have chosen "Shutdown" in the first place.

Personally I'd say it would be better to skip from Step 2 to Step 4 missing out the redundant set of questions in the middle.