On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 11:29:02PM +0200, Lars E. Pettersson wrote:
On 04/17/2009 10:32 PM, Anders Rayner-Karlsson wrote:
- Lars E. Pettersson lars@homer.se [20090417 21:37]:
How often does people actually accidentally press ctrl-alt-backspace? I have *never* done it.
By same argument, taking a rather tongue in cheek attitude, how often does countries with nuclear ICBM's launch them by accident?
It is not argument as such. If the decision has been made to remove this functionality, the decision has to be based on something. In this case it seem to be based on that people accidentally can press this key-stroke combination and loose data. If this is the case, it is important to know how often this actually happens.
If you look at real life. In our kitchens we have knifes. You can accidentally injure yourself quite badly with a knife. Should we just because of this zap all knife blades to make them safe?
no, but most people keep them in a knife block and not in the same drawer as ladles, stirring spoons and whatnot.
I.e. we have made a decision that knifes are good to have, accidents do happen, but the benefit from having knifes are greater than the consequences of the accidents that can happen. So we keep our knifes.
and by moving the kives to a separate place we may have saved a few fingers over the history.
Also, it's important here that we're not talking about the butter knives where you can't hurt yourself unless you swallow them as a three-year old (like VT-switching, easy to recover). we're talking about the really sharp cooking knives, the onces where you don't know you cut yourself until you hear the scraping on the bone.
also, I think this knife analogy is stretching things a bit, but I like cooking (and it beats debugging grabs anytime), so we can continue :)
This analogy converted to this discussion says that OK some, a few, may accidentally press ctrl-alt-backspace, but at the same time this particular key-stroke is very handy under those circumstances when X behaves badly. By removing the functionality you also adds another cost, the cost of extra data loss and other problems, i.e. with file systems, as user, when ctrl-alt-backspace does not work, finally will press the reset button or power cycle their computer. As I see it the benefit from having ctrl-alt-backspace is greater than the cost of a few loosing data.
I.e. how often this problem happens, people accidentally pressing ctrl-alt-backspace, is a valid question in this discussion. Does it happen more often than X crashes? Or less? This is an important parameter in the decision to keep, or not keep, the functionality.
While you certainly can present an argument based on that you have _never_ done this by accident, I'd like to point you at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance for reasons why this is, IMHO, not a sustainable platform to argue from.
Sigh! I just mentioned that *I* had never accidentally pressed this key combination during all those years that I have been using Linux, and therefore find it strange that this has become such a big issue that some wants to remove this functionality. It was *NOT* ment to be a platform to argue from, such an argument would be plainly stupid. If I during all my years have never accidentally pressed this combination, how often does it happen to others? I.e. for me X crashes have happened way more often then me accidentally pressing ctrl-alt-backspace. How is it for others?
fwiw, about once a week or so for me (I have a lot of shortcuts on ctrl+alt).
btw, it's quite interesting to look at the key press/release events as you're typing you'll notice that often you're typing multiple letter before releasing the first.
Cheers, Peter