To shut down or restart your Ubuntu machine, you click the Power button on the top panel and select the shutdown option which in turn opens another confirmation dialog box where you have to confirm your action of shutting down or restarting your Ubuntu machine. This same confirmation dialog box will also appear whenever you try to log out or lock your Ubuntu machine.
Of course, this feature is there to save you from the unnecessary shutting down and restarting of your Ubuntu machine. But if you have been using Ubuntu for a long time, then accidentally pressing the Shutdown button is pretty rare. That said, apart from being useful, this feature is kind of annoying, as sometimes we may forget to confirm our action due to things like ignorance or workload which in turn leads to unnecessary power consumption. Here is an easy way to turn off the Shutdown and Restart confirmation dialog box in Ubuntu 14.04.
Note:
1. Even though we are showing this in Ubuntu 14.04, this tip should work in other recent versions too.
2. Turning off the shutdown and restart confirmation dialog box will also turn off the confirmation dialog box for logging out and locking your Ubuntu machine.
Turn Off Shutdown and Restart Confirmation Dialog Box
Before doing anything, if you observe the options under the power button, you will find that there is no Restart option by default. This is because the Restart option is found in the confirmation dialog box. After you disable the confirmation dialog box, the restart option will appear in the list of options.
In order to turn off the Shutdown and Restart confirmation dialog box in Ubuntu, we need to change an indicator-session setting. To do that, open your Ubuntu terminal and type:
gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.session suppress-logout-restart-shutdown true
Once you press the Enter button, the confirmation dialog box will be disabled immediately. There is no need for you to restart or log off. Once you are done executing the command, you can safely close the terminal.
As said before, if you press the power button in the top panel, you will see that the Ubuntu has automatically added a Restart option so you can quickly restart whenever you want.
In the future, if you ever want to re-enable the Shutdown and Restart confirmation dialog box, just replace the value “true” with “false” in the above command. Once replaced, the command will look like this:
gsettings set com.canonical.indicator.session suppress-logout-restart-shutdown false
Once you have executed the above command, Ubuntu immediately enables the shutdown and restart confirmation dialog box. There is no restart or log off required to see the changes.
That’s all there is to do, and it is that easy to turn off and on the shutdown confirmation dialog box in Ubuntu 14.04. Do comment below if you face any problems while following this tutorial and do share your thoughts on how good this Ubuntu feature is.
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Vamsi Krishna
Vamsi is a tech and WordPress geek who enjoys writing how-to guides and messing with his computer and software in general. When not writing for MTE, he writes for he shares tips, tricks, and lifehacks on his own blog Stugon.
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