WTF are you doing to your keyboard?

Posted Tue, 05/19/2009 - 16:42 by Justin Ellison

So, I have yet to upgrade my laptop to Ubuntu Jaunty, but I saw this article on how to re-enable Ctrl+Alt+Backspace in Jaunty come through my feed reader. A little more research dug up this Ubuntu Wiki entry proclaiming: a number of users have complained about accidentally restarting their X-Server

Now, maybe I'm getting old, but I can't tell you how many times I've been saved a reboot by that handy Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut. My rant? What in the hell are you trying to do that you "accidentally kill X" by happening upon hitting that key combination? Was it really so many people that you had to kill the shortcut for everyone? There is a line that can be crossed when listening to your users, and I think Ubuntu has just crossed it. What are your thoughts?

No votes yet

Comments

Seriously?

by Anonymous (not verified) - 05/19/2009 - 18:35

Can't say I see it as that big a deal in either direction honestly. Certainly not large enough to be "Ubuntu crossing the line".

Little bit of perspective here please folks, it's just an X windows restart command, hardly a big deal.

I meant it as a light-hearted

by justintime - 05/19/2009 - 18:44

I meant it as a light-hearted twist on an annoyance -- that must not have come through in the article.

Have you ever used Ctrl+Alt+Backspace? When tinkering with laptops and suspend to ram, it's invaluable.

Would they have crossed the line if they removed the "middle-click to paste"? How about removing Ctrl-X as the cut shortcut (since I'm sure some users have accidentally cut text).

Somethings gotta hit your rant button!

It's messing me up

by daybringer (not verified) - 05/20/2009 - 22:03

It was so much easier and to hit ctrl+alt+backspace than it was to find the log out button to restart a session... You will be missed dearly as default, I'm still editing my config files to include it.

On my keyboard, the backspace

by Anonymous (not verified) - 05/21/2009 - 07:29

On my keyboard, the backspace key is right next the the insert key. CTRL-ALT-INS is a commonly used shortcut in vmware-infrastructure client to drop focus on the virtual terminal.

I actually disabled CTRL-ALT-Backspace before this update..

Also, I heard it was a change in the upstream Xorg rather than ubuntu..

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