restarting X server

[Jonathan Byrne]

On 3/17/2009, "Paul Lemmons" <paul at lemmons.name> wrote:


>It is a much debated decision...

So I see. Apparently those who would disable it won the day, then? This
is unbelievable. I have never in my 10 years of Linux use accidentally
hit ctrl-alt-backspace. Nor have my young children, who tend to pound
away at the keyboard in a rather exuberant manner. They have, however,
found all sorts of ways to hang X, especially when running full-screen
apps, and hang it completely enough that ctrl-alt-backspace was the only
option short of reboot.

This makes me a pretty regular user of that feature.

I've been sitting here fiddling around with my keyboard and trying to
imagine some way to accidentally hit ctrl-alt-backspace and have not yet
come up with it, other than going for ctrl-alt-delete and missing. In
that case, it's not a big deal if one's intent is to reboot and one
instead kills X.

WRT the argument that data could be lost from apps where work wasn't
saved, as seen in that link, all I can say is "duh." A reboot will
cause that work to be lost, too. And the fact that we're using a highly
stable OS doesn't mean we shouldn't save our work often. I do. :w is
definitely part of my muscle memory :)

If there is any other key combo that approximates ctrl-alt-backspace that
I'm just not thinking of, *that* is the one that ought to be disabled,
rather than remove a mainstay of X of many years' standing. I bet even
GNOME doesn't do that :p

If this issue is still up for debate, I hope leaving ctrl-alt-backspace
alone will be more carefully considered as the best option. If it's
not, well, Kubuntu is hardly the only distro out there.

Yes, I can manually re-enable it. No, I shouldn't have to. If it's even
going to be an option, it should come as a setup question in the
installer, such as:

Allow ctrl-alt-bksp to restart X? (Y/n)

Allow ctrl-alt-del to reboot? (Y/n)

Put it along with the dialog for setting up the first user, and you're
all set.

Best,

Jonathan