I'm wondering if I'm the only one who's had "one of those moments" while using a Linux Desktop. If you're up for an experiment, please read on (all you linux hackers who already know what this feature does can just skip the experiment).
Steps for the experiment:
- Make sure you don't have important programs running, or at least save your open documents. It's quite possible that the result of this experiment will log you out of your computer temporarily.
- Press the following keys all at the same time: Control + Alt + Backspace
Now before you go off on me to say how awesome that hidden "feature" is (if that's you, you must be an old-time linux hacker), please consider that this behavior may not be so cool to someone who unexpectedly presses these keys by accident.
For example, I wonder how the guy writing a lengthy term paper (due the next day, of course) felt when he discovered this feature for the first time. Or what about the dad who stepped away to grab a drink when his two year old came in and pressed a bunch of buttons?
Anyhow...if this feature has ever plagued you, would you please add your comments here:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=59038
If it hasn't, I guess I feel even more alone. See my original blog post regarding this to find out how you can disable the feature from biting you again.
11 comments:
Reminds me of when I used to play Tribes... when a server started lagging because there were too many people, I'd just tell everyone that Alt+F4 brought up a secret cheats menu. Man, I was an asshole.
Anyways, I love this feature because it can get you out of a lot of tight spots without having to reboot. That said, it might not be such a bad idea to disable it by default.
Keep in mind that, although inconvenient, you can also press Ctrl+Alt+F1 - F6 to gain a terminal, login as root, and kill X. This means that killing X is still possible and just a bit more friendly to non-hacker end-users.
I consider it a great feature, and I'm by no means a long-time Linux hacker. I've only used Linux as my main OS for about 6 months, and have no hacker background on any platform.
Still, I knew about that feature before this entry and it has been a lifesaver a few times.
One time something was eating up memory like it was going out of fashion. I never managed to find out what was the culprit (like I said, no hacker or Linux guru) but the computer in question has 2 gig of physical ram and a 4 gig swap partition. Things were starting to become very sluggish, and I took a peak at the ram usage (it's in my KDE taskbar). Turns out that the physical memory was pretty much exhausted and swap usage was around 60 % or so. I could hardly believe my eyes either...
Nothing reacted as it should, and I could not log out properly since the GUI was unresponsive. Hadn't it been for ctrl-alt-backspace I would have had to use the powerswitch to get out of that situation.
I do agree that the magic-key-combo should be something less likely to be activated by accident. Is it possible to reconfigure X in such a manner?
"Keep in mind that, although inconvenient, you can also press Ctrl+Alt+F1 - F6 to gain a terminal, login as root, and kill X. This means that killing X is still possible and just a bit more friendly to non-hacker end-users."
Are you kidding me? This is much *less* friendly to a non-hacker, I'd much rather have C-M-Backspace.
If I could change anything, it'd be to pick a shortcut that's less common, like C-M-ScrollLock, or make it so you have to press backspace twice instead of once (like Ctrl-ScrollLock ScrollLock on Windows)
Setting DontZap is certainly the easy solution, but the correct solution is to make sure this isn't destructive. X is a client-server protocol, it should be the responsibility of the client to gracefully handle a sudden failure of the server. If GTK+ and KDE applications handled this by saving state then this wouldn't result in any loss of data. So perhaps the bug reports should be filed in those applications.
Should we then also make sure to disable the Alt-SysRq S,U,B rebooting...
And of course we should protect people from typing :() { :&:; } ;: into their command line (PS don't use that code in your command line!)
More seriously, I do agree it would be nice to have Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to bring up a warning explaining what it does, the first time it used, with the option to disable the warning.
Hi,
I never had a problem with that. I started using Linux with Mandrake 9.0. They state the emergency shortcut. C-M-BS was one of them (along with Sys Req magic keys).
I found that useful and never heard anyone having a surprise with that. However, would be nice to have something similar to Cmd-Option-Esc on Mac OS X, showing a nice dialog with running apps (not processes) allowing to force quit one.
Metacity already have a cool feature when closing an app which didn't react fallback to force quit.
Regards,
Étienne.
ctrl + alt + backspace has saved me so many times. I installed beryl when it first came out...and had tons of bugs. Now and then my whole window manager would lock up...keyboard and mouse did nothing...the only way to fix it without a reboot was "ctrl + alt + backspace". This is a nice feature. Besides, who accidentally hits ctrl + alt + backspace? If you dont know what you are pushing then stay off a computer.
> "Besides, who accidentally hits
> ctrl + alt + backspace? If you don't
> know what you are pushing then stay off
> a computer."
Nice. Maybe I should have asked first, "How friendly is your distro's community."
I'd suggest that the person writing a lengthy term paper should develop my nervous vim twitch: ESC :w ENTER after every paragraph or less. Or its equivalent in other apps.
I know that's mean of me, but it's how I feel. We can't protect users from the power button, after all, and in a way, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is very reassuring to me. It's like the ultimate panic button if X is going all wrong, but without actually rebooting.
David has a good point about apps and dealing with a sudden X server failure. Perhaps that should be investigated - I'm sure the toolkits could provide hooks for attaching the appropriate behaviour for.
Ultimately though it'd be nice if X was a bit more screen-like, and clients could be detached and reattached at will.
Personal view:
I think the Ctrl+Alt+BS combination is complex enough not to be pressed "by accident". And it's a well documented feature, or that seems to me. I new about it when I had just two weeks of experimenting with Linux (and I'm just a user, and self-tought in lonux!). Perhaps what I should be, if it's not the case, is to be clarly explained and documented in any distro documentation. If one is supposed to be trying a new OS, or simply a new program, one is supposed to read the documentation..... though I hink anyone forget doing it sometimes... at least I do fro time to time--- :-P
The idea of showing a warning, or a "task killer" with the combinations doesn't seem good to me... If "X" is not working responsively (an that's the main reason to kill it, isn't it?), and we ask X to create a new process (even if rpioritarire) to show the warning or the task window, it won't be so fast as you could need.... (just, how many times that was not usable enough on windows?). It's better to go deeper in the system, and to kill the X server, as it does.
And the same is for me with the virtual terminals (Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6). If the X server is working too badly out of control, they will be too slow.... (again, at least my experience).
I think that the hard coded combination option is the more usefull. Any case, if you still think it's a "too easy to accidentally push" combination (that does not seem to me, but of course that could be arguable), it could be changed into a bit more complex one (CTRL+ALT+A+BS, for example, or anyother one). That could be, for me, the only acceptble solution. Though personally, as I said, the CTRL+ALT-BS seem safe enough for me.
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