This is just my 2 cents, but I feel I should express it. In my view, restarting the X Server is not an "essential function". It's a hack, a terrible hack, to compensate for poor programming of X. We should not come from a place where we ASSUME X will fail, and thus enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace by default. We should assume X will work. Pre- enabling an emergency reset key combo is a show of weakness, or at least a strong lack of confidence. If it turns out X craps out on you a lot, A) you should be talking in the forums where B) they should tell you to run "sudo dontzap disable" so you can restart it.
But frankly, if Xorg does not detect your monitor's refresh rate correctly, that error should be reported and fixed in X. X should not have to be restarted in such a crude way except on development machines. If you encounter errors where you need to use Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, I would rather see the errors reported and fixed so restarting is not necessary. @Raptor: Just as a practical aside, I bet if you specified your monitor's refresh rate directly in Xorg.conf you wouldn't need to restart it so many times! The "three finger salute" argument is poor as well. In no modern OS does pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete cause an instant restart. Since XP, it merely pulls up the task manager or a display giving you choices to log out, shutdown, etc. Restarting X is not an "excelent way to deal with a problem in a program" [sic]. Ctrl+Alt+ESCAPE is the way to deal with a hung program. Now, I agree that the best solution by far is to have a "Getting Started" page that lists all the essential Linux keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+Alt+Delete, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, Ctrl+Alt+Escape, Alt+SysReq REISUB et al. However, the vast majority of people are not like you and me - they will never read any assembly instructions or a user manual. They will just close such a page without reading it. Therefore, there should be no key shortcuts enabled by default that allow such catastrophic damage to the user's environment as killing X. It is only fair to mention that I'm a fan of Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. I use to use it all the time - I frequently am running development versions of major desktop environments, so restarting X is the easiest way to restart the DE and apply changes. But disabling it by default is not "condescending hand holding". To the contrary, it's reserving powerful features for power users who are willing to google for 10 seconds learn to type "sudo dontzap --disable" or enable it in the GUI interface. But I will agree that the situation is not ideal. If I could suggest a modification of the original reporter's idea #2: there should be a step in the installation setup for advanced users, with dozens of checkboxes for settings like "Enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace" so that power users could enable these features during setup, rather than be faced with a surprising "Why the *** doesn't this work?!" moment later on. Then both newbies and power users might be satisfied. -- Enable Ctrl - Alt - Backspace by default https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/359721 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
