Bug 381887

GTK emits system error bells to play an alert sound. By themselves, these are extremely unpleasant. So several years ago, GNOME 2.0's window manager metacity was changed to capture system bell events and translate them to a more pleasant sound [1]. This is well and good for GNOME, but KWin does not do the same thing, so GTK programs run from within a KDE Plasma environment *do* emit harsh, unpleasant system bell noises instead of something nicer like /usr/share/sounds/KDE-Sys-App-Error.ogg.

Absent KWin performing this translation, there are only bad options:
1. Live with the unpleasant noises, which cause user frustration and hatred [2].
2. Turn off the error bells throughout all of GTK by setting "gtk-error-bell = 0" in /etc/gtk-3.0/settings.ini, which prevents any alert sounds from playing at all. And regardless, this would be a distro change, not something KDE could enforce.
3. Turn off the PC speaker systemwide by adding "blacklist pcspkr" in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. This is actually what Ubuntu does. This silences GTK programs as well as any potentially legitimate uses of the ancient PC speaker, and as with #2, KDE can't enforce this.




[1] For more information see these bugs for background:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=607906
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/module-init-tools/+bug/77010
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/486154


[2] See some of the comments in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/module-init-tools/+bug/77010):

"No longer get the beep that just about gets people evicted from their apartment for blasting it at 3AM, or blows out someones ear drums while relaxing to some music with headphones."

"I would go so far as to say that we NEVER want to play the system beep during the course of a normal graphical session; sometimes it is so loud, users look as if they had received an electric shock"

"It was especially antagonizing when I was playing Solitaire as my last act before heading to bed, using the rote click-click-click to stupefy my attention and relax; except that clicking an already clicked card caused this loud shrieking bleep, which rather defeated the purpose of the game for me."