Comment 8 for bug 632341

Technically it would be fairly easy to do this and toggle/enforce Numlock on boot.

What makes it /hard/ is not the technical problem of /how/ to do it, but the policy decision of /when/ to do it. For instance, on this Thinkpad laptop, Numlock is already a Fn+key special combination. When this combination is toggled the keys 7-9, u-p, j-l, m-. become the keypad and because of the default enablement of Mousekeys (System->Preferences->Keyboard->Mousekeys) these normal alphabetic keys actually then start to control the mouse pointer movement on-screen.

Whilst changing the default here might make some people's lives easier, it would cause a great deal of confusion for a user who has installed, or is using Ubuntu on a Lenovo laptop for the first time.

To take this proposal forward the policy (what to do in each situation like the above) needs to be clearly described. If the complexity of all those options is too great, then it might be preferable (and very valid) to continue to respect whatever setting the hardware starts up with as being the most reliable. Quite often the BIOS accessible at boot has an option regarding whether Num-lock should be enabled or not on start-up.