After configuring the keyboard to Portuguese (Brazilian) and removing the English layout, it works nicely. However, after rebooting, the system goes back to the English layout, although System Settings still shows that the Portuguese keyboard is active. You must go into the configuration and change something (anything, it seems) to that the keys start (again) to work with the Portuguese layout. My guess is that this happens with other layouts, too. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Go to System Settings -> Hardware -> Input Devices -> Keyboard -> Layouts 2. Enable lyout configuration 3. Add a new keyboard layout (in my case, Portuguese, Brazil, br) 4. Remove the English layout 5. Apply the changes 6. Test the changes in the Hardware tab, inside the test area 7. Go back to All configurations 8. Close system settings 9. Perform a clean exit (shutdown) from the system, using the graphical menu. 10. Turn on the computer again 11. Login into plasma desktop 12. Open any application 13. Try to use any Portuguese from Brazil specific layout key, such as "ç". 14. It was expected to have a "ç" character on screen, but we get ";" (which is the ";" location of standard English keyboards). 15. Go back to system settings and notice that only the Portuguese, Brazil, keyboard layout is selected. 16. go back to the Hardware tab, test area, and observe that the active layout is the English one (although it was removed from the system and the Portuguese, Brazil, one is selected). 17. Change anything or perform the selection again. 18. The correct layout works until the next reboot Actual Results: The English keyboard layout is always active when the system initializes (after a cold boot or a reboot). Expected Results: The selected Portuguese, Brazil, keyboard layout should be active at all times, including after reboots. I've upgraded to Plasma 5 from KDE 4 when Archlinux dropped support for KDE 4. I've tried to manually erase all old KDE configuration files before performing the upgrade, just to be sure nothing would break. My system is up-to-date as of today December, 22, 2015. This is an annoying bug because there are other people on the house the use this system and they are not computer savvy enough to figure out how to change the keyboard layout.
I'm running systemsettings 5.5.1 on Gentoo and I have followed your steps precisely without encountering any problems. I changed the leyout from Polish to Portuguese. Rebooted. It worked. Changed back. Rebooted. And mine worked again. Seams like the bug was introduced in 5.5.2 or there is an problem with your setup. Someone else should test it on systemsettings 5.5.2.
Somewhere during the upgrade from kde 4 to plasma 5 there was a question about udev or libinput or something. I'm not sure what I was supposed to choose...Maybe it is related.
Additional minor information. While playing with the configuration I've noticed that if the checkbox named (I'm translating from Portuguese to English, so the actual name might be a little different) "Show keyboard indicator even if there is only one layout" is checked, when I reboot, it shows "en". The minor information part is that not only the system is using a layout that was removed, but it is also showing the "correct" name of that removed layout.
I've seen that I didn't have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf file so I've created one: Section "InputClass" Identifier "system-keyboard" MatchIsKeyboard "on" Option "XkbLayout" "br" Option "XkbModel" "pc105" EndSection However, that didn't solve the issue, either.