I was researching how to enable the kill X keybind, historically known as CtrlAltBackspace, and stumbled upon this discussion:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=73617
There, in post #7, the following was said:
In the versions of X.org-server > 1.6.0 they have disabled 'Zapping'.
In that discusion it was declared that alt-sysreq-k was "better" [than
zap] because it's harder to hit accidentally and more reliable due to
being implemented in the kernel and not X.
Does that mean that CtrlAltBackspace is officially deprecated? And the replacement is to use AltSysrqK (kill all processes on the current virtual console) instead?
I was not able to find the original source of said discussion. Sadly it was not linked.
Note that the discussion was from 2009.
Note also that I am not asking how to enable CtrlAltBackspace. I am asking whether CtrlAltBackspace is officially deprecated.
Best Answer
The bug tracker entry at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/10510 ("Xorg should use a more unlikely key combination than Control-Alt-Backspace as the server zap key") was closed as "WORKSFORME" after it was pointed out that "zapping [is now] disabled by default", so I guess that's why they saw no more reason to change it. So zapping seems generally deprecated as an everyday feature.