IMHO, the laptop should beep loudly when hibernate fails, and a dialog box with error message like "You have too many programs open to hibernate successfully. Try quitting some and hibernating again." should appear once you log back in to X.
The loud beep should prevent people from telling their computer to hibernate and not noticing that hibernate has failed because they walked away/stuck it in their luggage/trunk of their car. -- Proposals for "Swap Partition too small for Hibernation to work" scenario https://launchpad.net/bugs/21413 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
