Please revert Xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

[Gerry Reno]

Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 03:38:38PM -0400, Gerry Reno wrote:
>   
>> Users killing their X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is not by any means 
>> a rare occurence.  We all wish it were.  And in the total tens of 
>> millions of worldwide installations, the use for that purpose, far 
>> outweighs any usage among the tiny Emac user community.   And further, 
>> the impact to making such a change becomes an entire worldwide problem.  
>> If Emacs users have a problem with a keystroke conflict then they need 
>> to create special xorg.conf files that eliminate that conflict for 
>> them.  And not expect the entire world to have to put up with a hugely 
>> disruptive change all for the benefit of one small community.
>>     
>
> For the nine millionth time, it has nothing to do with Emacs.
>
> Here's what it comes down to:
>   you want the default to be optimised for the X server locking up or
>   crashing in such a way that it needs to be force-killed, knowing
>   that most of the people who make use of that are perfectly capable
>   of creating a configuration file; whereas the people who don't know
>   what it is or does or how to create a configuration file, have to
>   create a configuration file.
>
> No.
>
> EOT.
>   

The default needs to remain as enabled.  Because otherwise you are 
taking functionality away by default that has proven very useful for a 
long time.  In changing this default you are requiring that every user 
or sysadmin must create special entries, special install procedures to 
reenable the functionality.  Further, absolutely no one has ever 
complained to me about accidentally hitting the three-key 
Ctrl-Alt-Backspace sequence and losing data.  In all the years of using, 
administering, and managing *nix systems I have not seen any problem 
surrounding this key sequence.  We're talking many thousands of users.  
Users in call centers, network, applications, engineering.  And I've 
searched countless forums trying to find references to problems with 
this key sequence and there are none.  Out of millions of installations 
if there were some big problem needing solved here I would expect to 
find lots of discussion among real world users.  There just isn't any.

So now you propose taking away functionality from users and replacing it 
with what?  Nothing.  Unless of course each of the millions of users 
takes action on their part.  And now we end up with a landscape where 
some system have the expected behavior and some don't.  That makes life 
miserable for users and especially sysadmins in many companies.

The solution used by OpenSUSE as I understand it, calls for a default of 
enabled but requires the user to press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace twice within 
two seconds and the first press emits a tone and you must press the 
sequence a second time while the tone sounds.  This would at least keep 
the key stroke available by default, would work with present tools which 
have Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on their menues, and would prevent any of these 
"accidental" pressings of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.  And yet, we hear nothing 
about this solution from Xorg. 

And at least this solution would enable users who in rapidly increasing 
numbers are using virtualization on their desktops from having to kill 
all their virtual machines because they have to power cycle when all 
they needed was to zap a misbehaving X server which today is a trivial 
thing.

Regards,
Gerry

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