GNOME 3.20 To Have Better Support For Airplane/WiFi Hot Keys

GNOME developer Bastien Nocera has landed support in GNOME Settings Daemon for supporting the airplane (WiFi and Bluetooth) hot-keys with small notification overlays.

The enable/disable Bluetooth and airplane/WiFi keys on many laptops should now work with GNOME for displaying small notifications when pressing these keys. This is building off the rfkill D-Bus service and new work being done in gnome-settings-daemon for audio jack notifications.

This work stems from a feature request for media keys support from 2011 for XF86Bluetooth/WLAN/UWB. The support just landed in the GNOME Settings Daemon Git ahead of the GNOME 3.20 release in March.

Some examples of these new UI notifications can be found via this blog post.

On a slightly unrelated note, but while writing this article and digging through the gnome-settings-daemon Git, they have dropped support for non-libinput mouse configurations. With moving the input device handling into the compositor, they have dropped the evdev and syntaptics settings to handle just libinput on both Wayland and under X.Org via the xf86-input-libinput driver.