Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

Mark Shuttleworth interview (Linux Format)

I like facts, so I created an default user and logged in under gnome, to
test how Gnome handles keyboards... Let's see...

* the keyboard configuration dialog has four tabs and more geek options
than I could understand. (But to be fair, since all these options are just
the usual xkb things, there's not much Gnome can do apart from hiding
them. KDE spreads the same stuff over three tabs.) The third tab doesn't
show text until I click on a vague stippled dot.

* no indication of a shortcut to change keyboard layouts: googling doesn't
give me one either for gnome, instead I'm told to use the panel applet.
However, if I add a second keyboard layout, the applet doesn't get added.
That means, no way to change the keyboard at all by default. (Maybe
there's a shortcut, and maybe it does work, but it is not widely
advertised.)

* Googling tells me that "separate group for each window" means having a
different keyboard layout per window.

* When Russian is active, the keyboard shortcuts don't work, at least not
in firefox, because the keyboard does send the Cyrillic keysym instead of
the the latin one. Same as with KDE. I think this problem has its roots in
X11, not just Qt. In other words, if KDE does just not work for you,
neither does Gnome.

Just for context: I do use a lot of different keyboard layouts since I
regularly type Greek, Cyrillic, English, Dutch (which needs
us-international) and sometimes, but not as often, Devanagari.