On Mon, 2024-02-05 at 20:59 +0000, Michael Kjörling wrote: > On 5 Feb 2024 21:06 +0100, from h...@adminart.net (hw): > > [...] > > --- and then I need to be able to change the keyboard layout in > > wayland sessions unless I use an US keyboard. But I only have one > > of those. > > Pretty sure /etc/default/keyboard has been a thing on Debian for just > about forever. I haven't dug into the details but it seems to date > back to 2006 which would put its first appearance at circa Sarge or > Etch (3.1/mid-2005 or 4.0/early-2007 respectively); possibly even > earlier, but that's as far back as the console-setup package history > goes.
Yeah it was an issue back then, and how do you know that there's such a thing as /etc/default/keyboard and what it means. Try to get a German Model M keyboard to work right with Xorg in, for example, 2010. It starts with the question 'How many keys does it have?' and soon the question is 'How do I turn CapsLock into Ctrl?' and 'How do I put that into xorg.conf?' --- which eventually was omitted, so you had to bring that back, and that even in snippets, to get it to work. Ugh ... Even fvwm kinda never got it right because stuff would change in some ideosyncratic, unexpected way depending on if NumLock was on or off. So don't you dare to turn that off --- and for almost 30 years we had to manually switch on NumLock every time we started an X11 session and if we were to switch to a console, we had to turn it on again and then do something because it was screwed up after switching back (or the other way round). How can it be so difficult to get basic things like that right? It still sucks because after more then 30 years, we still don't have a good way to change the keyboard layouts! > The one on my Bookworm system even has a comment right there on how to > use an entirely custom keymap, and that's also mentioned in the > keyboard(5) man page. "In Debian systems the default keyboard layout is described in /etc/default/keyboard and it is shared between X and the console." Xorg doesn't seem to be maintained anymore and is on the way out. So how do you change the keyboard layout when using wayland?
