Clearly, the app *isn’t* preventing the shut down or, at the very least, the user’s authority is not needed to “shut down anyway.” What’s happening?
Edit: thanks everyone!
In: 13
The app is simply telling the operating system it isn’t quite done with what it needs to finish before it can close, then it finishes and tells Windows it is done and Windows finishes shutting down.
Often that app is taking longer to shut down than others but before you can force it it’s able to shut down successfully and move on
It could be that a process was in the middle of something, like logging or cleaning up other background processes. A lot of these will lock files so nothing else can interfere with it.
When you restart it’s saying “hey wait a minute. I need to finish up first or you’re going to lose this log.” Not too dissimilar to when video games tell you not to turn off the game when you see the auto-save symbol. You’re likely going to lose that save file.
Thats just one example. It could just be a background program that is having a bad day and failed to close properly. These weird things happen sometimes.
Computer: “Hey, everyone time to go to sleep.”
App: “I’m still running, I can’t go to sleep yet.”
Computer: “Fine, hey user, this app won’t go to sleep, want me to chloroform him?”
App: “Nevermind, I’m finished what I was doing, I can go to sleep now.”
Computer: “Oh, okay. All good here.”
*everyone goes to sleep*
When you shut down a computer, the operating system (OS, be it linux, windows, other) has data in RAM that needs to be written to permanent storage (SSD/HDD), and some services need to be stopped in a specific order to avoid issues. Say service X depends on service Y, which depends on service Z…you want to stop them in X, Y, Z order. The OS tells apps to shut down, saves what it needs to, and waits for apps to shut down before it turns off background services. If an app doesn’t exit after a timeout, you get the “do you want to kill it” message.
When an app is told to shut down, it has it’s own things to do. Stop work in progress, save changes, save logs, whatever, and then exit. Some apps aren’t written well enough to notice the OS told them to stop. Some *do* notice, but have parts of them that don’t accept being interrupted so they try to shut down and get stuck waiting on something else. Network apps (web browsers, P2P file transfers, etc) are historic offenders here, they’d be waiting for a response from whatever site they were talking to and just…sit there.
If the OS just killed the app without asking, it might lose things you wanted to keep. The last 30 minutes of edits in a document, a huge file you were downloading that hasn’t finished yet, an ML model that’s been training for the past 6 hours, whatever that app is working on. Nobody likes those surprises, so your computer asks if you want to shutdown anyway so you know *why* your stuff is missing the next time you bring it up.
when you close a program your asking it to close, it then should save whatever files it wants(things you’ve edited and configuration files) wipe caches, finalize file transfers and what not.
if you use task manager to ‘end task’ your telling to the operating system to stop processing that application, essentially ‘killing’ it without waiting for the application to close it’s self.
this is what ‘shut down anyway’ does.
Think of a normal shutdown like a restaurant closing for the day. All the customers have to finish eating and leave, and the cooks have to clean the kitchen. Unplugging a running computer is like pulling the fire alarm at a restaurant. Everyone inside has to leave NOW, regardless of what they’re doing.
In your case it’s like calling a restaurant you own and telling them to close. They’ve got a customer who won’t leave, so they ask you if they should kick that customer out.
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During this time, a copy of what you were working on might be done depending on the app, which might allow you not to lose your work. The app might also do some other essential tasks before closing.
If you are fast enough, you can cancel the shutdown before the computer closes your app and shutdown.
It’s a good idea to have an app open that is slow to shutdown while playing an online game on a Windows for this reason. It increases the chance that you can avoid your computer shutting down your apps and updating.
Clicking on shutdown anyway is usually a bad idea. The OS will close the apps pretty fast anyway and they might be doing useful work during this second like saving your progress, finishing updating some files, etc. Only click on it if somehow, the app is still blocking shutdown after a while (Waiting 30 seconds should be enough). It would only happen if there is a bug or it’s a malware.
When this happened, it was usually a app that had unsaved work, meaning a shut down would possibly erase it
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