KGlobalAccel on non-Plasma systems

[Nicolas Fella]

That will continue to work. The window manager doesn't really matter
here, at least on X11.

On 06.04.21 20:31, Konstantin Kharlamov wrote:
> Just to clarify a bit: by "only running on Plasma system" do you mean running
> when $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP = KDE? Or something else?
>
> The reason I'm asking is because I'm a user of Plasma + i3wm, and having various
> shortcuts automatically set up by Plasma (specifically: screen brightness,
> various multimedia keys) is certainly one of the reasons I love this
> combination. I wouldn't want to see it break. This combination has
> $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP set to KDE, so it is safe in that regard.
>
> On Tue, 2021-04-06 at 17:29 +0200, Nicolas Fella wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> we received a few reports [1] [2] from people using non-Plasma systems
>> that the kglobalaccel5 process was started, leading to clashes with the
>> native global shortcut system.
>>
>> This seems to happen when apps call some API of KGlobalAccel which
>> results in the kglobalaccel5 process to be DBus-activated.
>>
>> This brings me to the question of whether there is a use case for using
>> KGlobalAccel on non-Plasma systems at all. While technically
>> KGlobalAccel should work on all X11 systems most (all?) desktop
>> environments have their own way of global shortcut handling that we
>> should not interfere with. On Wayland it is only working in combination
>> with KWin. On systems that do not use X11 (Windows, macOS, Android) it
>> is most likely not useful at all. api.kde.org lists only Linux and
>> FreeBSD as supported, but the code contains special casing for non-Unix
>> platforms and for macOS.
>>
>> At the recent Frameworks sprint we talked about better communicating
>> whether a given Framework is truly a cross-platform/cross-desktop
>> library or an implementation detail of Plasma/used for integrating with
>> Plasma [3]. It seems to me that KGlobalAccel falls into the latter
>> category.
>>
>> If we agree that KGlobalAccel is only relevant when running Plasma we
>> should take the necessary steps to ensure it does not get activated in a
>> non-Plasma environment to avoid nasty side effects. Clearly defining the
>> scope would also help frameworks and app developers make technical
>> decisions and would allow to clean up some unneeded code.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Nico
>>
>> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435420
>>
>> [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=430691
>>
>> [3] https://phabricator.kde.org/T14294
>>
>