off
is an alias to poweroff
The response is very clear. Anoyhet user is tunning a process which blocks unelevated shutdown. You can override it with the command privided in the response.
Like mentioned in a peer comment, sudo shutdown now
would resuly in the immediate shutdown of the system, ignoring any interrupts. If anything else fails, interrupt power. It should start fine.
It could be a process you are running under a different user (safe), which demands you to shut it down cleanly.
Linux provides the mechanics to prevent the problem you’re angry about.
Pretty sure using sudo or being root helps with that. Other than that: never have I ever seen that. Pretty sure this is a shit distribution.
I don’t know why it’s inhibiting you here, but Linux is a multi-user OS (meaning multiple users can be logged in at the same time), so it definitely makes sense for it to have a mechanism like that. If another user is in the middle of a long-running operation, it might be very bad to forcibly cancel that…
i’ld say this has nothing to do with linux (as linux is the kernel and what sucks there is your distributions choice of how things are handled), and i guess this is just one of tens of thousands of poisoned systemd crappy design “decisions”. i went from systemd away for the same crap why i went away from windows. there are tons of very “interesting” similarities between systemd and windows and “it sucks” is just one of them. use a linux distro without systemd and stop complaining about linux when systemd is what actually fails for you. ;-)