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There is no visual feedback of any kind between plasma and plymouth when user selects shutdown or reboot from the application menu => IF disabling the 30 second count down in System Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Sesstion -> Confirm logout.

So users either have visual feedback, but must endure 30 seconds of waiting before their computer is going to shutdown or reboot. Or they have no feedback at all... until finally... 10 seconds later... the screen shows the plymouth.. at which point the user can finally conclude that what the user did 10 seconds ago, has worked.

The problem with having no visual feedback is that I can easily select reboot/shutdown from the application menu about 7 times consecutively before "plasma finally seems to respond". Of course shutdown is already in progress, but even as an experienced enough user and developer, it really feels like the system is just sluggish / non-responsive. Feedback really is important for a product.

Even if you have a fast computer and no open desktop applications, the time between plasma and plymouth takes enough time for people to start to wonder what is going on.

I believe this is quite a miss for such a beautiful product as KDE Neon, because if a user has the 30 second confirmation dialog disabled, every user session basically ends in a........................................................................... weird goodbye

I agree. When shutting down, logging out, rebooting, etc. (regardless of the confirm logout dialog) it would be very helpful to pull up a splash screen similar to the log in splash screen to hide the chaos as things work on shutting down (ensuring that any save-unsaved-work dialogs get presented to the user, regardless of whatever desktop/activity the window may have been on).

A few days after my initial post KDE Neon 5.12 LTS was released of which one of the head-lines was "The process of starting the Plasma desktop is now significantly faster".
The exit from plasma to plymouth seems to have improved also (although not always the case when shutting down).

Before 5.12 LTS, this shutdown delay / non-responsiveness was pretty much in-your-face obvious. And although technically there is still a problem (because sometimes there is still that delay), it isn't that obvious anymore. So less of a biggy.

I still think it would be common sense for plasma (like any interface) to show some user feedback upon shutdown/restart/log off, and not relying on some other system which may or may not show (in this case the plymouth or logon screen).

Though, I'm very glad startup / shutdown of plasmashell is improved this much already Cheers to that!