Shut down / suspend not working on Dell Inspiron 7437 about wingpanel-indicator-session

[jeremypw]

Seems others have had problems with Ubuntu 18.04 (upon which elementary is based) and Dell laptops. There are some suggested fixes here: https://www.dell.com/community/Linux-General/Suspend-resume-problems-on-Ubuntu-18-04/td-p/6072410. I am surprised shut-down is not working for you though.

[jeremypw]

Shutdown/suspend functions are not dummy - they work OK on my machine - but can be problematic on certain hardware. I have edited the description accordingly.

[quequotion]

I've been having to shutdown by command line all year, and most of 2020 as well.

I don't think this is hardware-related; somehow the suspend and shutdown DBUS calls are getting lost or misfiring.

If I try to shutdown using the indicator several times, the computer eventually reboots.

Edit: kind of embarassing, part of the problem is that I have been using wingpanel with window managers other than Gala for so long, I missed that there is now a gala-dependent shutdown dialog (why not just use an ordinary dialog?) That does not explain, however, why making several attempts to shutdown with the menu eventually results in a reboot; that's just crazy.