Comment 25 for bug 34859

Sebastian, here is a real-life use case:

I sometimes press ctrl+alt+backspace when half-life2:dm on wine crashes. If that crashes, the system gets so slow that going to alt+control+f1 and killing it manually takes longer than doing a hard-reboot.

Perhaps we should just catch the keys in metacity and make it restart gdm cleanly. That might help.

Thirdly, I think you are getting a lot of these comments, because the control+alt+backspace thingie is all over the internet.

I have a couple of friends that won't touch a terminal ever, yet know that control+alt+backspace will rescue their system when the system seems to crash. I was the one to tell them that though. I'm not sure what to tell them now. I'll guess they just have to do a hard-reboort in those cases.

In other words: terminal is not acceptable for all types of users. Control+Alt+Backspace is the control+alt+delete of ubuntu and sometimes needed. In theory it shouldn't be needed because the system never crashes, but in practise, people are going to try stuff like beryl, compiz and wine. Even when their hardware is not capable of it. They use this shortcut at times, yet wouldn't want to touch a terminal.