when you boot up, it can bring everything back to life, since that would be the assumed need.

if you close a program, by accident or by choice, with unsaved projects or windows open, you wouldn’t be asked if they should be restored, as that would present the same annoyance, so maybe it could just be a function of each program.. being able to restore sessions if necessary.. like a time machine. no more asking; it’s just saved, just in case, and you bring it back if you want to.. because it’s there, no asking or bothering. you don’t really need dishes again until it’s time to eat.

Does the XO-1 save the state forever when you close it? Or just much longer? The Asus EEE uses a flash memory drive too so it may work the same.

From the hardware side, a little trap door covering the “shut down now” button could deter unwanted shutting down. What would be better would be to have some key command series that would do the same thing but not require hardware modification.

The basic premise here is that the shutdown process is awkward and broken. It could be improved on the OS side as you suggest with improved termination indicators. On the hardware side, if we could get away with flash memory rather than hard drives the situation would be easier — you can carry around a flash memory device with much less fear that you’ll cause data loss due to damage. With a flash memory laptop you could just close it and let it sleep without worrying that the hard drive would be damaged. The XO-1 is the first laptop device that I know of that works this way.

I’ve been trying to find this feature for Mac. Macs go into Safe Sleep when they no longer have power for regular Sleep, but often I know that I won’t be using it for a while and don’t want it to drain the battery sleeping.

In your criticism, one thing to keep in mind is that people errantly hit the shut down button sometimes. If it led their app to discard their work, they would be very pissed.

One nice solution may be for apps to more nuanced termination signals for the OS to use. E.g. you could say, “shut down now and clear all unsaved state” and your OS would send that specific signal to each process. Or “shut down now but give me the option to save things”.