That makes me think that I can now type in the group name – but when I start typing, things start jumping around on the screen, and I realize that I wasn’t typing in the group name, I was issuing keyboard commands to Ardour. I then click the “Name” field and select it:
I tried to find a keyboard shortcut (on Linux), to switch focus to the group creation window, but I couldn’t find one. Alt+TAB doesn’t do that, and neither does Alt+`.
Wouldn’t it make sense to switch focus to the new group window when creating a new group?
It could depend on window manager type and/or configuration. Try setting “Preferences → Quirks → All floating windows are dialogs”. After enabling this, the focus is switched correctly on all dialogs (including Track/bus group) on my KDE based system.
What circumstances are you thinking of? The issue here is your window manager and how it gives keyboard focus (or doesn’t) to new windows based on their type.
Is there a newer version? The download section of the website shows Ardour-8.6.0-x86_64.run as the latest version.
As far as the window manager is concerned, I thought that there were environment variables that a program can examine to discover the type of window manager. Perhaps this point is now moot because of the change mentioned by Robin.
I don’t know of any way to determine the identity of the window manager, and even if there is a way to do so, we are absolutely not going to start writing per-window manager hacks.