[Tails-dev] Disabling suspend on lid close? (#11502)

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Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: The Tails public development discussion list
Subject: [Tails-dev] Disabling suspend on lid close? (#11502)
Hi,

status quo is:

- Tails suspends (to RAM) on lid close.

- Until Tails 3.13.1 (inclusive), the only user-friendly way to
suspend the system was to close the lid. This will be fixed in
Tails 3.14, that will display a button in the status menu to
suspend the system.

- Until Tails 3.13.1, on some systems, Tails would trigger its
emergency shutdown procedure when resuming from suspend.
This will be fixed in Tails 3.14.

Now, some years ago, we decided to disable the "suspend on lid close"
behaviour and to display a button to suspend, for two reasons:

1. Coming back from suspend breaks sometimes on some hardware.

→ We've had suspend-on-lid-close enabled for years and this was
reported only once, 3 years ago. I doubt it's a widespread problem.

2. While the system is suspended, one cannot trigger the emergency
shutdown procedure simply by unplugging the boot medium. The user
has to first wake up the system, for example by opening the lid,
before unplugging the boot medium. This might violate some
users' expectations.

→ Now that we added a suspend button, as decided during the very
same discussion as the one that decided to disable "suspend on lid
close", we're exposing more users to the exact same threat. I don't
understand why it's more problematic to do so on lid close than
when suspending via that newly added button.

IMO we should stick to the default, well-known behaviour, of
suspending on lid close, and reject #11052.

Can any of you remember/think about strong reasons to deviate from the
defaults here?

If you feel like diving into the archaeological details:

- https://redmine.tails.boum.org/code/issues/11052 and the related tickets
- https://tails.boum.org/contribute/meetings/201605/

Cheers,
--
intrigeri