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I am a pretty new user of Raspberry Pi, and I booted it just once so far.

I used NOOBS to install Raspbian on a microSD card for my RP3. When I wanted to shut it down afterwards, I Googled it to learn the proper way to do so.

My expectation was the shut down button on the GUI drop down menu of Raspbian [see photo below] to be the preferred way. However, it seemed that there wasn't a unanimous decision about the right way to shut it down. Most answers I have found didn't even mention the GUI at all.

enter image description here

So what should I do? Is using the mentioned button OK? Or should I use a command in terminal? Is there really a difference at all?

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    The shutdown button will work just fine, of course there are terminal commands that will have the same effect. As long as you are not yanking out the power cable whilst the Pi is running, you are not going to run into any problems.
    – Darth Vader ♦
    Dec 17, 2016 at 15:52
  • @DarthVader Hey there! Thanks for your reply. Is it normal that Raspbian boots into GUI directly? On most of answers I see on this side, a command-line-based OS is mentioned.
    – SarpSTA
    Dec 17, 2016 at 16:45
  • It defaults to gui however that can be changed by running raspi-config and changing appropriate setting.
    – MatBos
    Dec 17, 2016 at 17:06

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Shutting down the Pi properly can be done using either the GUI or the command-line. All the GUI does is invoke the proper command-line command.

Different OS's and different users will have different setups as to whether the Pi boots to the GUI or to the command-line. Raspbian defaults to the GUI since it endeavors to be user-friendly for new users not familiar with Linux. As mentioned in one of the comments, this can be changed back and forth using the raspi-config utility.

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  • Is the GUI button option very new? Because most of old topics I found, almost all to be honest, mentions nothing about it.
    – SarpSTA
    Dec 23, 2016 at 20:28
  • @SarpSTA Some GUIs have it, some don't. Since the older Pi's were kinda weak when you load a GUI, most people only ever use the command-line.
    – tlhIngan
    Dec 23, 2016 at 21:20
  • There are different types of GUIs in Raspbian?
    – SarpSTA
    Dec 23, 2016 at 21:22
  • You can change the GUI in Raspbian, and there are different OS's that have their own GUI. A popular alternative is XFCE --> raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=7571
    – tlhIngan
    Dec 23, 2016 at 21:28

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