PrintScr button not locked to WiFi Fn-key when Fn-lock is activated

[Peter Bittner]

I have an XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS preinstalled (purchased Aug/Sept 2015), and I find it very convenient to lock the Fn-keys (pressing Fn-Esc), so that I only need to press the function keys (without the Fn modifier) for hardware and multimedia actions.

This does not seem to work for the WiFi button (PrintScr), though, i.e. the button at the right of F12. For that button I always have to press Fn+PrintScr to activate/deactivate WiFi, and only PrintScr to print the screen (which opens the Gnome screen shot tool). It would be nice to have this button also available without the Fn modifier when locked with the Fn-lock function (Fn+Esc).

NOTE: I have a German keyboard hardware layout (de-DE).

[Peter Bittner (peter-bittner)]

Is there anyone monitoring this bug tracker? Could this bug report please be triaged?

[Kyle Fazzari (kyrofa)]

I suspect this is by design so that you don't accidentally disable wifi while trying to hit the + key.

[Peter Bittner (peter-bittner)]

This would be interesting. Then we should also make it "by design" that when I press the "Mute" button "F2" should be triggered instead; just to make sure that I don't "accidentally mute my sound".

No, seriously, this can NOT be an intentional behavior. This is a bug (we may compare the behavior on Windows to verify the assumption). It probably makes sense to match the behavior designed by the hardware manufacturers on all supported operating systems. -- Any XPS 13 user with a Windows OS around?

What does DELL's hardware / multimedia keys specification say?

[Peter Bittner (peter-bittner)]

@kyrofa Ah, re the "+" key. There is no "+" key anywhere near the PrintScr button on my keyboard. German keyboard layout that is.

[Vitaly Korolev (vitaly-korolev)]

I have 9350 variant with both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 15.10. Both OS behave the same when the wifi button is pressed with Fn-locked. So I'd say this is not a bug even though I agree that it's confusing.

[Chai T. Rex (chaitrex)]

This is almost surely by design. It happens in both OSes and, in the system ("BIOS") settings, permanently reversing what the Fn key does also reverses it for everything except PrtScr and the WiFi kill switch. The consistency under all those conditions strongly indicates that it's on purpose.

The difference between muting and turning WiFi off is that most people have experience with various electronics having a mute feature (silencing your cell phone at a movie theater, for example). There's also a universal method of fixing the problem: either turn the volume up or unmute. Almost all people know to do one or the other.

People don't have much experience with WiFi kill switches. They don't usually know that they even exist. So when they accidentally flip the switch, it appears that WiFi is broken. Even the normal ways of fixing a broken WiFi connection—bringing up the list of nearby access points and selecting one—appears broken. They can't fix it in the normal way, and they don't know the correct way. That's much worse than accidental muting.

Then they waste the time of Dell's technical support line.