Utility of ctrl-alt-backspace

The bigger problem in X server and application bugs. There's no easy way to work around them
and the kill sequence is a quick way to recover. Yes, you can say these should be fixed,
but I've seen them for as long as I've used Linux which is more than a decade now. Whether
Firefox, OpenOffice, some full-screen game (the worst because they seem to make virtual
console switching fail when they lock up), or whatever locks up your session, this gives you a way
out.

Really, I'd like to see the X protocol extended so grabs weren't needed as often, and so there was
a safer way to do grabs. But that hasn't happened and it would take a long time for things to be
rewritten to take advantage of it.

The X server going into a catatonic state (or crashing, but at least then you can login and restart
it) is also something which is hard to fix, because there are so many different video cards and
extensions.

So, in summary, I hate to see this go without a replacement. Someone mentioned that Sun
requires you to hit the key sequence three times in a row -- that would be fine with me. The
alternative is to ssh in and kill things from another computer, or to power-cycle the box, which
isn't convenient.