Comment 11 for bug 201711

Making the function keys only accessible after pressing the fn key is terribly unintuitive. There are a few points that seem to be in favour of making the behaviour of this keyboard like all other keyboards with respect to function keys.

* Although this is standard behaviour for macs, I see no analogous behaviour in any other Unix system.
* Ubuntu (and Linux) users are not using macs with these keyboards, and typically expect behaviour on their keyboards to be similar between keyboards (minus obvious key position changes).
* Regular keyboard behaviour is such that the unmodified version of the key is displayed on the key itself below the special symbol: eg "1" is below "!", ";" is below ":".
* The apple aluminium keyboard has the F*-symbols below the special behaviour symbols so it really makes sense for F* to be the default behaviour.
* Function keys are more often used that the apple functions on a Unix machine (other than the standard Help, Search, they are also used to change between ttys with ctrl-alt-F*); they ought to be more readily accessible.

Is there really any good justification for enabling unusual and unexpected behaviour for this keyboard by default? Is this not completely against the philosophy of making things easy for the end-user?

Who do we need to convince to accept a patch that would rectify this?