F11: xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

[Matthew Garrett]

On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 11:02:33AM -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 10:58 AM, Rahul Sundaram
> <sundaram at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> > Then, you might as well as stop running any Linux distribution. Matthew
> > Garett code is in not optional in Linux.
> 
> Does not compute.  How can someone who is allegedly intelligent not
> understand the difference between typing ctrl-alt-backspace and rm?
> Both could potentially cause data loss, so why remove one and not the
> other?
> 
> Maybe mister smarty can explain that to the list?

Ctrl+alt+backspace is a single key away from various other commonly used 
combinations - outside the emacs universe, a bunch of the gnome 
shortcuts are ctrl+alt+something, and ctrl+backspace is "delete previous 
word". When you have a key that's affected by modifiers, it doesn't seem 
unreasonable for people to try hitting other modifiers as well to see 
what they do. In my case, it was normally from flicking between 
workspaces and then going to hit backspace before I'd fully released the 
modifiers.

rm -fr / is rather a large number of keystrokes away from pretty much 
anything else you might want to do.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org