F11: xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

[Bill Crawford]

On Tuesday 31 March 2009 13:23:05 Anders Rayner-Karlsson wrote:

> And the BZ's for this observed behaviour are...?

Why don't you go search yourself?

> > > Through past experience, I have never found an instance (since moving
> > > from XFree86 to Xorg) where the Xserver was wedged in a way that
> > > switching to a vc did not work, but C-A-Bs did. I have seen plenty of
> > > X lockups (Xorg intel driver issues in F10) in the last few months and
> > > not a single one of those were resolvable by C-A-Bs.
> >
> > you have just different user experience
>
> That is entirely possible. I did a straw poll among my technical
> colleagues (and included a Senior Director for good measure) and the
> only one that uses C-A-Bs (due to flaws in suspend/resume) is the
> Senior Director. No-one else could find a reason to retain C-A-Bs as
> enabled by default.

That flaw might not be easily fixed; and in the meantime, until it's fixed, what 
should he do?

> Maybe - and here's the rub - disabling the ability to kill X
> willy-nilly would encourage people to file bugs against the
> applications that really misbehave, allowing for an overall
> improvement of stability, usability and end user experience?
>
> Or perhaps some people are perfectly content having to shoot their X
> server on a regular basis because they can't be asked to file a
> bug... That's real community spirit at play, right there.

Developers hate bugs that go "suddenly my X server seemed to not be responding". 
It might be an X server fault, it might be an application issue, and in this 
day and age the odds of most people being able to narrow it down enough to make 
a readable bug report are pretty small. The main pain point here is that at the 
point the problem occurs, it's often very, very difficult to obtain any useful 
information.

Now, if you are volunteering to help ... ?