How to disable drop-down QTerminal when pressing F12 in Workstation-LXQt?

Support
1

I am running Whonix-Workstation-LXQt on VirtualBox. In this environment, pressing F12 opens QTerminal as a dropdown. I want to disable this feature because I do not need it and it interferes with using the Tor Browser developer tools, but I do not know how to disable it.
Removing the shortcut key from the QTerminal GUI settings does not apply the change.

2

This is configured in labwc’s settings. The file enabling it is /usr/share/desktop-config-dist/labwc/rc.xml, specifically this part of the code:

    <!-- For qterminal dropdown -->
    <keybind key="F12">
      <action name="Execute" command="qterminal -d" />
    </keybind>

I don’t know if there’s an easy way to override this with end-user configuration. This seems like a bad default that we inherited from lxqt-wayland-session, so we’ll probably remove this the next time we publish an update for desktop-config-dist. In the mean time, if you delete that section from that file in sysmaint mode, then reboot, F12 should no longer open a QTerminal dropdown.

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3

Probably, configuration files under /usr/share/ are default values and should not be edited. Do you know the path for configuration files that override these (for example, under /etc)?

4

The override file is in /home/user/.config/labwc/rc.xml (you may have to create the directory and/or the file), but the problem is that labwc’s configuration does not seem to allow unsetting a keybind when I looked it up. Files under /usr/share are default values and usually should not be edited, but in this instance I’d edit the file anyway since the only real risk (other than breaking the file) is that a future update of desktop-config-dist could overwrite it. If that future update no longer contains the problematic code, that won’t be a problem.

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5

What a f**king terrible OS. I never should have switched to LXQt in the first place. I should have stuck with Xfce.
Switching to Wayland has become an end in itself, completely ignoring the fact that Wayland is still a piece of junk that is not ready for practical use.

6

To be clear, this was a configuration bug on Whonix’s side, not a problem inherent to Wayland. No one else ran into the bug and reported it, and we didn’t notice it. That’s why bug reports are valuable :slight_smile:

Switching to Wayland is not an end in itself, there are concrete security advantages (unrelated to the typical “apps can’t spy on and control each other” advantages) that come with it. Beyond that, X11 is (semi-rapidly) dying. See: