Right. Ironically, the xkeyboard-config change has defeated the change in KDE Frameworks 6.18, which assumed the key would continue to be treated as Meta+Shift+F23 and would have allowed it to be used for shortcuts in KDE Plasma.
It’s now more awkward in KDE because Qt doesn’t have a keycode for XF86Assistant:
The KDE dev there says:
And this is not simple to get, because Qt support oldish platforms, Redhat 8.6 released 3 years ago. Qt for Linux/X11 | Qt 6.10 .
So this XF86Assistant will take years to be there. Unless we go through some hoops.
XF86Assistant has been available since xorgproto-2021.2 (presumably roughly the same for libxkbcommon), so over 4 years now. That doesn’t help with RHEL8 but RHEL9 and newer have it at least. But because it’s remapped in XKB it’s possible to remap it back to plain F23 via XKB too to make the KDE workaround work again. Might be worth filing an xkeyboard-config issue to have this as an option for this use-case.