Is there an actual reason for this change?
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| BernardSwiss Mar 05, 2013 4:24 AM EDT |
The only thing I can think of might be concievably be a "sensible" reson, would be the cramped, non-standard mess some laptop keyboards make of the standard layout: It's conceivable that CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE might be triggered by accident -- but I've never heard of anyone actually suffering this mishap. |
| vagabondo Mar 05, 2013 5:32 AM EDT |
I do not think that this deviation from the Xorg default behavior is general. It seems that this article is yet another attempt to pretend that Ubuntu is the only Gnu/Linux.r described as Ubuntu specific, now we have the reverse. |
| tracyanne Mar 05, 2013 5:53 AM EDT |
@Bernard, that's the same question I had, and upon checking Global keyboard shortcuts on my Linux Mint KDE desktop I discovered CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + DEL now does what CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE used to do. I'm still rather perplexed as to why the change. |
| r_a_trip Mar 05, 2013 11:27 AM EDT |
It's conceivable that CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE might be triggered by accident Yep, that was the rationale a couple of years back: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XorgCtrlAltBackspace |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 05, 2013 12:24 PM EDT |
FWIW, the article doesn't mention the Linux distribution involved. It's Debian. |
| rnturn Mar 05, 2013 12:43 PM EDT |
The "use cases" listed in he "XorgCtrlAltBackspace" link seemed a little overblown. Let's change something that's been in place for years and years to fix a problem that the vast, vast majority of users are going to experience maybe once every few years. (Unless they're totally incapable of controlling where their fingers strike the keyboard.) I cannot recall ever pressing that sequence of keys by accident (and my typing skills still suck rather badly). All this has done is move a magic sequence of keypresses to another location on the keyboard which klutzy keyboard users will accidentally discover them during their attempts to get themselves out of a jam and they've gone into "press-all-the-keys-until-something-happens" mode. These are the same people who used to click on everything in sight on Windows when they didn't know what to do and now expect that same action will do something positive when using Linux. Bending over backwards for these folks is just going to tick off your installed base. |
| notbob Mar 05, 2013 1:04 PM EDT |
I suspect all distros make minor changes like this. Even steadfast ol' Slackware makes these minor changes, now and then. For years the "three finger salute", ctrl-alt-del, would do a full reboot from anywhere. Then, a few revs back, it changed to only kill X if you were in X and repeating that keystrokes would then reboot. Why? I have no idea. Make yer own distro and do it how you want it! Such is Linux. ;) |
| set Mar 05, 2013 5:31 PM EDT |
This article describes using a generic kernel facility, otherwise known as 'magic sysrq'. In this case, it tells the kernel to kill all processes on the current console. X isnt really special cased, except it happens to be running on the console at the time. There are a score of such 'alt sysrq' combinations, directing the kernel to do various things, such as reBoot, Unmount all filesystems, etc. |
| BernardSwiss Mar 05, 2013 8:27 PM EDT |
@set Thank you very much, for that clarification. That even makes sense. (I actually noticed the resemblance to the traditional "Raising Elephants Is So Utterly Boring" incantation, but didn't realize it was intrinsic). |
| mbaehrlxer Mar 06, 2013 12:49 AM EDT |
this is not an ubuntu thing, this is a change that was at one point actually made by Xorg. http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=9d135ac1...
fedora picked up the change too: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_11_Beta_release_notes#X...
others i don't know. that particular change has been reverted: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/commit/?id=737b4919... but as the comment explains that this is handled by xkb now so we need to look there for what the current default is. greetings, eMBee. |
| Steven_Rosenber Mar 06, 2013 3:05 AM EDT |
On many an occasion I have opened a virtual console and killed GDM from there, but it's a lot of steps. alt-PrintScreen-k is much quicker if I don't have any other processes running that I wish to keep alive. |
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