SUMMARY I recently installed kde via "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop". Before that I was using gnome3, and I had my keyboard set up with spanish as the only and selected layout for literally years. The first time I logged in with Plasma, I realized the keyboard was in US layout. So I clicked on the "EN" symbol on the bottom-right of the screen; a selector unfolder where the two options "US English" and "Spanish" were available, and I selected Spanish. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Log out and in again in Plasma 2. Type something into some application OBSERVED RESULT The keyboard was behaving as US English despite the fact that the indicator said ES. I clicked on the indicator and selected ES. It still behaved as US English. Then I changed it to US English, and back to Spanish, and finally it started to apply the Spanish layout. This is pathetic. I've been trying KDE for a few minutes and I have already spent more time reporting bugs than using it. I can't believe it's even more broken than Gnome. EXPECTED RESULT SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Kubuntu 20.04 KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.68.0 Qt Version: 5.12.8 Kernel Version: 5.4.0-40-generic OS Type: 64-bit Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-3632QM CPU @ 2.20GHz Memory: 7,6 GiB of RAM ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
I have tried removing the English input method. I thought: maybe, if I only have Spanish (which anyway is the only one I really use), it will setect it by default. Nope. That only makes it worse: if I only have Spanish as the only input method, the keyboard will still behave as US English despite the fact that the indicator shows Spanish. And because I only have one language, I can't switch forth and back for it to take effect. So I need to have two languages. When I log in, Spanish will show up as selected but the keyboard will behave as US English. Then I'll need to change it forth and back to Spanish and it will work. I remember having the exact same issue many, many years ago in Unity. How this can still be an issue is beyond my understanding. I have tried checking the checkbox "use system keyboard layout" in Advanced. However, with that checked, no matter what Input Method I choose, keyboard will always behave as US English. Which is strange, because I'm pretty sure the system setting is Spanish (at some point years ago I was asked when installing Ubuntu for the first time and I certainly selected Spanish).
I found System Settings => Input Devices => Keyboard => Layouts and found out there was only one layout, US English. I added Spanish there, removed English, and now everything works as expected. I don't know why the only layout in System settings was English. I don't know whether that setting belongs to KDE or if it is more low-level and system-wide. If it is the latter, then somehow installing KDE changed it, because I know I had Spanish as the only one or at least as the selected one before. If it's KDE-specific, then KDE should have asked me when installing or on the first login, because it's a very basic setting. That only explains part of the issue. Apparently there are two layers: system keyboard layout, and iBus (whatever that is) with its "input methods" (whatever they are). Apparently, on startup, even if you have a given input method selected, and even though it shows up as selected in the ibus indicator, it is not applied. The system layout is applied instead, until you explicitly change the input method. That's broken. And if you only have one input method, then it's never applied and you cannot force it to be applied by explicitly selecting it because it's already selected.
This bug is still present on current Fedora Rawhide. From what I remember, this problem started occurring since the login screen started using Wayland (?) along with other issues like screen blinking. And from what I remember, the default keyboard layout language was not actually English but Afrikaans, which has the same layout as English and is first in the list of languages. Selecting other languages still does nothing. I consider this a serious issue.