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
