Meta keys have changed their effect

Ask Fedora
1

Hello,

for the past two weeks, I am encountering an issue with my keyboard in Fedora 42, KDE Plasma edition: various meta keys have changed their effect. Some examples:

  • Alt+F4 can be used close windows and still does, but now it also switches to the text console tty4 as if I had pressed Ctrl+Alt+F4. I.e. it still closes the window, but switches at the same time to text mode. I can switch back with Ctrl+Alt+F2 and the window I meant to close is gone as expected.
  • Window-Meta + Cursor keys allows to move and rearrange windows in KDE Plasma. It still does, but it also switches to text mode terminals tty1 or tty3, depending on if I pressed cursor keys left or right, respectively.
  • Ctrl+S is used in various programs to save the current document. It still does, but it also activates Scroll Lock. No negative effect, except for that the Scroll Lock LED on the keyboard lights up.

There are probably more ‘broken’ key combinations, but those are the ones I notice most.

I have not touched any keyboard-related setting in months (at least what I am aware of and remember).
I do run dnf update --refresh once or twice per week, so it is possible that the change came with an update I installed 10 to 20 days ago (early November).

I am not really sure where the problem comes from and how to fix it. There are no error messages or log entries. KDE Plasma, Wayland, and various other programs react to key strokes as before and as they should, except for that more things happen as well. The behavior happens both with the laptop’s built-in keyboard and external USB keyboards (tested two different ones).
My guess it that it has to come from some low level software, maybe the kernel or libinput(?), but I have no experience debugging anything like this.

Any suggestions how to start collecting information would be appreciated.

Thank you!

2

You can test this hypothesis by creating a temporary new user and checking whether you can reproduce the buggy behavior in that new user.

1 Like
3

For reference, I cannot replicate any of these issues.

Maybe got into KDE Settings, and reset your keybindings to default. Might also cast an eye on your Keyboard settings within KDE’s System Settings, to ensure they are as you expect.

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4

Saying that, I have a Windows 11 laptop for work, so I have no control over its settings. I use it with a keychron Bluetooth keyboard.

As I type (and this happens at least once per day), some key combination I hit triggers Windows to go into screenshot mode. The screen will darken, and I get the usual “full screen/rectangular/freeform area” selector at the top of the screen to take a screenshot - only Escape will return me back to being able to interract with the system.

It can happen with some combination of cursor keys in the lower right of the keyboard, and yesterday managing to hit backspace and “+” (UK keyboard layout) triggered it. I literally have no idea how I do it, but something thinks “he’s hit Meta+Shift+S” when I’m nowhere near those keys. Windows 10 was fine, 11 does this daily.

As such, I feel your pain OP :slight_smile:

5

I have a secondary, unused account on the same machine (so not a new account). The problem of ‘extra effect’ does not appear there. It is reasonable to assume that some setting in my main account is the culprit.
My next step will be to go through all settings and configurations which look like being related to keyboard settings and compare them against the secondary account.