I switched back to Linux recently, trading an aging MacBook Air—it was wonderful in its days!—for Dell XPS 13. It’s been a hardware upgrade in every sense (well, except for the weird camera location and crappier sound speakers).

I am greatly satisfied with my non-orthodox KDE setup with a few tweaks, except for one little thing I can’t even properly google (I get a lot of results for keyboard customization).

I noticed a weird thing: MacOS never gets multi-modifier shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift, Alt-Cmd, etc) wrong: I never get Ctrl-D/Shift-D instead of Ctrl-Shift-D, which happens pretty often on my new Linux system.

This could be explained by the hypothesis that the MacOS input layer has a special delay to account for this: when Ctrl, D are pressed in a short time, it waits an instant for another modifier key to follow (e.g. Shift) and produces Ctrl-Shift-D. The XWindow (xinput?) behavior seems more straightforward: it generates an event for Ctrl-D the instant when D is down, disregarding any modifier keys after that.

It’s a small thing, but quite annoying already.