Comment 5 for bug 1421219

Revision history for this message
JVD (jason-vas-dias) wrote :

It took me a while to discover this myself, by inadvertently pressing it -
I then went through every KDE "hot" key setting and disabled them ALL .
I think the one I pressed is hidden in :
 System Settings -> Workspace Behaviour -> Virtual Desktops -> "Switching" Tab
There you see key stroke definitions for actions like :
 'Switch One Desktop Down'
 ...
 'Switch to Next Desktop'
Since I've now removed all the definitions , I don't know exactly which one I pressed.
But I don't think it matters which one was pressed.
KDE's mechanism of switching desktops is fatally flawed and dangerous:
On a Desktop Switch, plasma attempts to kill every application that has a window open on your current desktop,
and when you switch back to that desktop, it attempts to "Restore" each application that it killed .
Perhaps for some applications based on the KDE / Qt framework this might work, but certainly not
for applications like emacs or xterm, with which I do 95% of my work .
When I pressed the desktop switch key, all my xterms, which were running applications on remote hosts,
were killed . Then when I switched back to the original desktop, KDE displayed a really annoying message
(in the context) that was something like "Desktop #1 Session Restored successfully" - only in no sense was
it successful : all the xterm windows I had previously running commands on remote hosts were restored,
but the commands they were running were not - they all ran new shell login sessions; the emacs I had running
did luckily have time to dump all the files it was editing to '.#$file#' recovery files, but when a new instance
was restored when switching back to the original desktop, it has started a new session (was editing no files),
and I had to search for all the '.#*' recovery files and recover them manually . All the work I was doing with
remote applications in the xterms , and in applications on other hosts / VMs connecting to the local X server
via TCP:6000 , was lost.
I don't have time to halt all my work and debug KDE desktop switching .
I've disabled the keystrokes for now, so this should no longer be an issue for me,
but I know there is probably some other desktop switching mechanism enabled that could
be used to kill my desktop session, and I think it is wrong that such dangerous code
should be left enabled by default ready to destroy the work of other unsuspecting users.