I upgraded from Fedora 37 to 38 on my desktop computer, where I use Corsair peripherals with the ckb-next project to control the lighting and firmware updates. Normally these devices work out of the box, and they still managed to work for typing in my password to decrypt my drive; however when I got past grub to the GNOME login screen I was not able to move the cursor or press space or any set of key combinations to either type my password or jump out to the TTY to see if that fixes anything.
After rebooting several times, I tried going back to my Fedora 37 install to see if that would fix it, however these became similarly unresponsive. I assumed at first that this was a screen freeze, however after waiting a couple minutes to see if it would unfreeze, however it faded to suspend as usual. I tried accessing the recovery partition; however my root partition was locked, so I installed a Fedora 38 live ISO to chroot into my drive and poke around to see if I could fix it. However when I booted into this I was no more successful inputting anything with my Corsair mouse and keyboard, so this is what made me suspect an input issue. After attaching a wireless USB mouse that I have, I was able to interact with the system.
To debug, I tried installing ckb-next on my laptop which I also upgraded to Fedora 38. At first it did not work, however I ran “sudo systemctl enable ckb-next-daemon && sudo systemctl start ckb-next-daemon” and then it began to work after opening up ckb-next. I was able to use my wireless USB mouse and the on screen keyboard to get the same on the Fedora 38 live ISO, however I’m not really sure how to proceed. I have an extra mouse, but unfortunately I don’t think I have an extra keyboard laying around anywhere, so I don’t believe I would be able to get access to the onscreen keyboard at the lock screen in my current install on my desktop.
I don’t have anything too critical, but I’d prefer not losing access to the files on my current install by using the live ISO to install a fresh Fedora 38 image, and my ckb-next install settings wouldn’t persist through reboot anyway. Am I able to do this by chrooting into my system using the live ISO and if so how would I do that? Does anyone know what could have caused this issue and to have it persist through images to installs of Fedora that previously worked? I don’t believe I needed ckb-next for basic typing and input functionality on previous versions of Fedora or other Linux flavors. Is there somewhere upstream this issue can be reported?
Additionally, ckb-next does not seem to detect any connected devices despite them only working with the setup as described.
EDIT: I confirmed this issue does not present itself in the Ubuntu 23.04 live ISO, so it doesn’t seem like a GNOME 44 or other type of “universal” issue
EDIT 2: I was able to get in to my desktop using the mouse because the accessibility icon at the top of the login screen allowed me to use the on screen keyboard. In GNOME software I received a firmware update for my mouse and it worked fine spontaneously; however, my keyboard is still not working and neither device appears in ckb-next. None of the fixes I have found persist through reboot and it all breaks anew every time. I also had to install multiple terminal emulators from GNOME Software due to the fact that I was unable to run terminal commands, because none of the terminal emulators- aside from Tilix- are recognized as text spaces by the onscreen keyboard (and thus I cannot press enter for commands copied from other text spaces). Once I was able to run commands I ran an update and that did not fix the issue.
EDIT 3: I created a Fedora 37 live ISO and everything works as expected, seems like a Fedora 38-specific regression. Additionally that update pushed to my mouse (somewhat obviously in retrospect) was a phony one that borked my device on operating systems with ckb-next successfully installed. The update was of a greater version number than any firmware version out for the mouse and made the cursor immediately run off the right edge of the screen upon movement. I had to force update the firmware with a Windows device borrowed from a family member, so this seems like something that really should be avoided on Fedora. All is good on non-Fedora 38 systems now.