Comment 29 for bug 388547

Thanks for your response.

Considering that pretty much every full-screen game I've played under Linux has suffered from this, I have to believe that it's unintentional on the game developers' part.

The fact is that we're now faced with a mountain of applications out there in the wild that are already suffering from this and will realistically never get fixed to use some alternate keyboard grabbing mechanism (assuming such a thing is even supplied by xorg and is neither obscure nor cumbersome to use). It therefore truly, realistically falls to xorg to decide whether or not to do something to resolve this issue that is resulting in a frustrating experience for many, many xorg end-users.

Without any knowledge of xorg's internals, I can think of two non-mutually-exclusive general design level ideas that might help alleviate the issue:

1. Some kind of xorg configuration option/mechanism could be provided to allow distribution creators, system administrators and/or end-users to choose to exclude the multimedia keys from the global keyboard grabbing mechanism.

2. Grabbing of multimedia keys could be spun out into a separate xorg API call or parameter (or whatever an xorg analog of that might be) that needs to be explicitly called/specified by the developer to signal that they really, really want to grab and handle those keys.

Call this a feature/enhancement request if you'd like (personally, however, I strongly feel that it is much more important than that due to a large impact on end-users) but please don't dismiss it out-of-hand.

Apologies if reopening the bug is a faux-pas. I'm not sure if my reply would be seen if I didn't do so.