How do I get "restart" option in the shutdown menu in Unity?

The dropdown menu I get when I click on the gear link in the top right corner only shows these options:

  • Lock Computer
  • Logout
  • Suspend
  • Hibernate
  • Shutdown

There is no "restart" or "reboot".

How can I make that option available?

Bonus question: Can I remove Hibernate, Lock, and Suspend?


The removal of the Restart menu item was a deliberate design decision - and to enforce this the developers actually removed the code...

Thus - the gconf/dconf entry...

enter image description here

... is actually a redundant entry that should have/but hasnt been removed.

To get the restart menu option back you will need to download the source code (oneiric v0.3.7 at the time of writing this) and to add back the code that was removed...

Fortunately #post11 of the bug report gave some example code of how to make the menu option reappear. If you want to go down this route - you'll need to manually merge in the changes since the diff patch no longer marry up with the current code content.

Happy compiling :)


I have Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS and experienced the same problem, my menu didn't show "Restart" and "Shutdown" anymore.

I installed https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/oneiric/dconf-tools/. In the left tree select apps > indicator-session and check/uncheck the following options:

  • Check suppress-logout-menuitem
  • Check suppress-logout-restart-shutdown
  • Uncheck suppress-restart-menuitem
  • Uncheck suppress-shutdown-menuitem

With these settings the "Restart" and "Shutdown" options appear again in the top right menu.