Dear Xorg community, In reading the Release Notes for the Alpha version of Fedora 11 I noticed a very disturbing change involving disabling the default Ctrl-Alt-Backspace behavior of killing the X server. This default behavior has been able to be counted on by sysadmins for years as a means of controlling the X server. It is now part of a sysadmins DNA. This default behavior is also relied upon by many tools especially virtualization tools which have Ctrl-Alt-Backspace embedded in their menu options and functions for controlling a virtual machines behavior.
I read in the Fedora Release Notes the assertions that this change was due to users complaining about confusion regarding the control key sequences relating to the X server. That argument was no doubt made by some in the Emacs community who find that the Emacs key sequences are similar to the Xorg sequences. I will tell you that this argument about confusion is totally bogus from an entire Linux community standpoint. The Emacs community is miniscule in size comparison to the overall Linux community. In over thirty years of working with *nix systems and thousands of users and machines not once has a user ever complained about confusion or problems involving the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination. I am concerned because it appears that a tiny minority of Emac users have managed to lobby for a very significant change in default behavior for X server control to the detriment of the majority of users and administrators in the Linux community. Already there are a number of angry threads popping up around the internet related to this issue. Please look at this particular thread that I started in the Fedora Development forum: http://marc.info/?t=123818605400006&r=2&w=2 I am asking Xorg to immediately reconsider its decision with respect to this change in default behavior regarding Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Please revert this change. Thank you. Gerry Reno _______________________________________________ xorg-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.x.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg-devel
