Shortcut for "Show activities overview" (toggle-overview, Alt-F1) failing randomly
Affected version
Fedora 34 (GNOME 40.1.0) Also, as of 2021-11-05, Ubuntu 21.10 (GNOME 40.5). See additional post below.
Xorg
GNOME shell 40.2 (and 40.5 on Ubuntu 21.10, see additional post below)
Bug summary
The keyboard shortcut for "Show the activities overview" (toggle-overview) is intermittently going through periods of time (minutes to hours) where it will fail to activate the Activities Overview, and then suddenly start working again for no apparent reason.
I've only experienced this on Fedora 34 so far. It has occurred on multiple installs of Fedora 34 on multiple different machines (Mac and PC laptops). I have NOT encountered it after extensively using Ubuntu 21.04 (with GNOME 3.38) on one of the same machines.
I haven't spent enough time in other GNOME-based distros such as Manjaro GNOME or OpenSUSE GNOME to say whether this is a problem outside of Fedora 34, or something specific to GNOME 40.
Setting the keyboard shortcut to a different key combo has no effect.
Restarting the shell, logging out or rebooting the machine seems to have no effect on whether the keyboard shortcut is in a period of working or failing. The state of change between working and failing seems to happen at completely random intervals for no obvious reason.
All other methods that I know of to trigger the Activities Overview work as they always do, such as clicking the "Activities" button in the top bar, triggering the AO from an extension menu option, using the hot corner, or using an extension such as "Hot Edge" or "Bottom Triggers Activities overview". The terminal dbus-send command also works:
dbus-send --session --type=method_call --dest=org.gnome.Shell /org/gnome/Shell org.gnome.Shell.Eval string:'Main.overview.toggle();'
Creating a custom shortcut using the above command works perfectly. But it should be doing literally the same thing as the "Show the activities overview" shortcut, so why is the regular shortcut failing? It's a mystery.
At all times all other keyboard shortcuts on these systems work normally, as far as I can tell, including the somewhat redundant "Show the overview" (panel-main-menu) shortcut. Default is Super+S.
I don't see how this could be relevant at all, but I will note here that I disable the "overlay-key" Super-key shortcut, which is why I have so frequently noticed this random failure of the "toggle-overview" shortcut. I have a keyboard remapper set up to let me open the Activities Overview by mapping the physical equivalent of what would be Cmd+Space on an Apple keyboard to the Alt+F1 toggle-overview shortcut. The actual shortcut remains unchanged as far as the shell should be concerned. More details below.
Steps to reproduce
-
Do a fresh install of Fedora 34 and update it. Use the system normally. Install some applications. Install snapd and a couple of Snap apps like "hello-world". Install some apps from FlatHub. Any of the most popular apps will do. Add a few extensions to the shell, like "Frippery Move Clock" and "GNOME 40 UI Improvements".
-
At least every 15 minutes or so, attempt to use the "Show the activities overview" (toggle-overview) keyboard shortcut to trigger the Activities Overview. Default is Alt+F1, I often change it to Shift+Alt+Space, it doesn't really matter. Also attempt to use the "Show the overview" (panel-main-menu) shortcut at the same time. It can take several hours for the issue to appear, but sometimes happens right away.
If the problem occurs, you will notice that the toggle-overview will simply stop working at some point, while the panel-main-menu shortcut and other keyboard shortcuts will continue to work normally.
- Possible (but HIGHLY UNLIKELY) step to reproduce:
Install Kinto.sh by Ben Reaves (a keystroke remapper that mimics macOS keyboard shortcuts via an xkeysnail config file)
At the moment this requires using a branch patched to install on Fedora, found here:
https://github.com/prosac/kinto/tree/make_intall_on_fedora_work_in_enforcing_mode
Kinto.sh will disable the overlay-key shortcut during install, but I say "highly unlikely" because I am fairly certain that A) I've encountered this issue before installing Kinto.sh, and B) it persists as a problem after disabling or completely uninstalling Kinto.sh (which reverts the few settings it changed to what they were originally). And Kinto.sh doesn't actually change the keyboard shortcut for "Show the activities overview", it just maps key presses like Alt+Space to Alt+F1. The Alt+F1 (or whatever the keyboard shortcut is set to) won't work during the "failing period" whether Kinto.sh is active or disabled.
I only mention this step because it is something that I always install relatively soon after installing most Linux distros, including Fedora 34. But having worked with it for a year or so, I don't think it has the ability to cause this particular problem. Not least because it doesn't change much of anything except setting the overlay-key to '' (blank) to disable it, which is easily reversible and a completely separate shortcut.
What happened
When attempting the shortcut while typing in a text box on a web browser, the highlighted border of the active text box will "pulse" as if something is trying to happen, but nothing else happens. If in a terminal, the terminal cursor will turn into a hollow outline for a moment every time the keyboard shortcut is pressed. In any other situation, there is no visible or audible indication that anything is happening.
What did you expect to happen
Expected: The "Show the activities overview" should toggle the Activities Overview reliably at all times, in the same way that the Super (overlay-key) and "Show the overview" (panel-main-menu) keys do.
Relevant logs, screenshots, screencasts etc.
I have no knowledge yet of how to troubleshoot what might be causing this. Posts in two different Reddit forums (Fedora and GNOME) haven't yielded any feedback suggestions on how to track down the root cause.