Shutdown from command line

[MintyO]

I use Mint (main edition with cinnamon and xfce and debian with cinnamon) as my main system and one important property to have is timed shutdown if (and when) I fall asleep when the computer is on. I have just been using "shutdown -h mins" under the impression that it's just about the same as going to the menu and clicking the shutdown option. So my questions are: why do I have to do "sudo shutdown ..." in debian when plain "shutdown..." is enough on the main edition side, and what (if anything) is different when using command to shutdown as opposed to clicking a shutdown button with a mouse. If someone happens to have answers I'd appreciate it. Not really a problem, but just curious.

-O

[Flemur]

If someone happens to have answers I'd appreciate it. Not really a problem, but just curious.

I always thought it was a goofy policy; I usually do chmod u+s /sbin/shutdown so regular users can run it, but there's more:
http://how-to.wikia.com/wiki/How_to_all ... r_in_Linux

[MintyO]

Yeah, I kinda thought the answer was in the line of "debian style policy". Thanks for the info, now I know how if I feel like changing it. I also did some reading on what happens when you shut down a computer, but didn't go down too deep into that rabbit hole. That's mostly the reason I ended my brief experiment with Debian as a daily OS and came back to "minty debian": I didn't want every little change I wanted to make end up taking hours of reading and learning (because I usually don't do something if I don't have some kind of understanding about what it is I'm doing).