GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 781727
Disable jarring beeps ("gtk-error-bell") entirely, in all platforms
Last modified: 2017-04-27 20:38:43 UTC
Steps to reproduce: 1. Open a GTK program that has single-line text fields (pidgin, lollypop, etc) 2. Click in the text field 3. Hit the backspace key Actual result: - A horrible jarring beep emanates form your computer and just about gives you a heart attack, even if you've muted the main speakers Expected result: - There should be no horrible jarring beep Additional information: I hope this isn't controversial, because I've never encountered *anyone* who liked this behavior of text fields beeping angrily, bypassing the system sound level or mute status. On my local machine, I disable this heart-attack-maker by setting "gtk-error-bell = 0" in /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and /etc/gtk-2.0/gtkrc, and I've been submitting patches downstream to do the same by default in other distros that I work on. But upstream is really the right place to make this change, so I'm requesting it here. It seems that the error bell was already disabled on Windows ages ago: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490624 Linux users don't seem to enjoy the error bell any more than Windows users did.
What you are saying is not correct. The error-beep is not bypassing the system sound level or mute status.
For me it is correct. I can mute the system and I still hear the beep. My hardware is an HP Spectre x360 (late 2016) without a physical PC speaker; the audio is piped through the main speakers somehow. I definitely hear the beep when the speakers are muted or turned to a very low volume level.
Regardless, it's immaterial to the bug report. These beeps are horrible and unwanted 100% of the time, even if I'm wrong.
I don't get a beep. I get a bark or a drip or a glass or sonar sound, depending on what is select in the sound configuration panel. And its volume can be like a whisper, or like a roar, depending on how I position the volume slider there. So clearly, something is amiss on your system. But that doesn't mean that everybody else is hearing the same. I don't think the sounds are unwanted 100% of the time either. People with poor eyesight, for example, will probably appreciate the extra confirmation that the audible feeback provides.
Audible feedback is desirable, yes. The noises you're describing are the system alert sounds, which are generally pleasant, or at least not awful. Those are good. I agree. Keep them. Use them. Expand them. I'm talking about something else entirely. Here is an example report of the same jarring beeps heard in GTK programs running on Linux Mint: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues/5253 If you're using Fedora, you won't hear the sounds I'm talking about, because they've been turned off there. I didn't start hearing them until I began to use GTK programs in other distros. If you have access to another non-Fedora distro (reproduced on opernSUSE Tumbleweed, Linux Mint, and Arch), you can follow my steps to reproduce and hear the beeps I'm referring to.
To be clear, we are talking about the "GTK error bell", not the system alert sounds (which is a bark or a drip or a glass or sonar sound, etc.). The system alerts are nice. The GTK error bell is incredibly unpleasant and jarring, and Fedora already has them off, humanely enough. They should be off upstream, not up to every distro to disable them. That way we can all have our nice system alerts without the awful error bells.
GTK+ is using the proper X / wayland apis to generate the error bell sounds. It is up to the desktop environment to hook them up properly to system alert sounds. Should work for any GNOME-based distributions, and I'm pretty sure it will also work in KDE.
OK, that makes sense. Sounds like a KDE issue. Thanks for triaging this with me!