Bug#1032319: gnome-shell: Accessibility Regression: ctrl-alt-tab doesn't stay on top bar

[Simon McVittie]

Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/5146

On Fri, 03 Mar 2023 at 13:41:43 -0700, Sam Hartman wrote:
> In bullseye I could hit ctrl-alt-tab to switch up to the top bar, and then use shift-tab to get to the system menu and do things like turn on/off networking.
> 
> On bookworm, that doesn't work.  ctrl-alt-tab does announce "top bar", but when I release it, I'm dropped back into whatever application I was in.

This seems like upstream issue
<https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/5146>, which was
apparently a regression in GNOME 42.

On the upstream issue, a bug reporter mentions that to reproduce the bug,
you need two things: the focus mode needs to be set to "sloppy focus", and
there needs to be at least one window open on the current workspace.

That suggests some workarounds: either set the focus mode to the default
click-to-focus, or use Ctrl + Alt + arrow keys to move to an empty
workspace. By default, GNOME Shell keeps one empty workspace available:
after the change from vertical to horizontal workspaces in GNOME 43, it's
the one on the right.

If click-to-focus is suitable for your workflow, the focus mode can be
reset to the default with this command:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences focus-mode

(I don't know why this regressed, and upstream don't seem to have any
ideas either.)

    smcv