KGlobalAccel on non-Plasma systems

[Aleix Pol]

On Tue, Apr 6, 2021 at 5:30 PM Nicolas Fella <nicolas.fella at gmx.de> 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
>

Hi Nico,
It makes a lot of sense.

And TBH, my first thought was "aaaah noooo". But then it kind of does
make sense. KGlobalAccel has a lot of logic to centralise these
shortcuts settings and in practice it's nothing that would be
realistically mappable to a non-Plasma system.

So in general, yes. +1

Aleix