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@xxxxxxxx> [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 -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
