The keyboard profiles have been breaking for awhile, maybe around a month or so. Back around a month ago I had to swap keyboard profiles back and forth a couple of times to get the right Alt-Gr key to work with pages 3-4 in any of the profiles I tried. I primarily tried English, Spanish, and US-Symbolic.
A few weeks ago, I could start with the US English (locale default) with the “Switch input sources individually for each window” option (the default), if I switched the layout to US Symbolic and then brought up the “Show keyboard layout,” it would only show me 2 of the 4 pages of the layout. So it was broken. Then, if I brought up the “Keyboard settings” page, and went to the three dot menu and pulled up the “Show keyboard layout,” page from here, it would show all four pages correctly. Finally, if I then went to the desktop menu and selected US-Symbolic in the options, I finally had all four pages.
A couple of weeks ago I wanted to just default to the US-Symbolic profile. I first tried just reordering the profiles this seemed to make the issue worse, where it took more effort swapping between profiles before the Alt-Gr pages would work. Some times I gave up, only to try again hours later and they worked. Then I thought maybe if I removed all other profiles and only kept the us-symbolic profile active it would solve the issue. It was fine until I shut down and booted the next day. Now nothing works with right Alt-Gr in Spanish, US-Symbolic, or any of the other US English profiles with Alt-Gr pages.
I have tried resetting Gnome Tweaks. At some point in this I enabled Gnome Extensions but that does not appear to be related, though I have tried disabling it.
I do not know what is what in this space like the warning here:
\~$ setxkbmap -query
WARNING: Running setxkbmap against an Xwayland server
rules: evdev
model: pc105
layout: us
I have tried:
\~$ setxkbmap us-symbolic
WARNING: Running setxkbmap against an Xwayland server
Error loading new keyboard description
…but that appears incorrect.
I have also tried localectl:
\~$ localectl status
System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
VC Keymap: us-symbolic
X11 Layout: us
X11 Model: microsoftpro
X11 Variant: symbolic
X11 Options: terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
Right now it reports “VC Keymap: us-symbolic”, but when I open Gnome Text and use Alt-Gr, none of the characters from pages 3-4 are present.
I have the following output from the Gnome terminal:
\~$ wev
\[ 9: wl_seat\] name: seat0
\[ 9: wl_seat\] capabilities: pointer keyboard
\[ 11: xdg_toplevel\] configure: width: 0; height: 0
\[ 10: xdg_surface\] configure: serial: 317
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] keymap: format: 1 (xkb v1), size: 68214
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] repeat_info: rate: 33 keys/sec; delay: 500 ms
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] enter: serial: 23113; surface: 3
sym: Return (65293), utf8: ‘\\r’
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] modifiers: serial: 23113; group: 0
depressed: 00000000
latched: 00000000
locked: 00000010: Mod2
\[ 12: wl_data_device\] data_offer: id: 4278190080
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: STRING
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: TEXT
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: COMPOUND_TEXT
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: UTF8_STRING
\[4278190080: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
\[ 12: wl_data_device\] selection: id: 4278190080
\[ 11: xdg_toplevel\] configure: width: 640; height: 480
activated
\[ 10: xdg_surface\] configure: serial: 319
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] key: serial: 23114; time: 13842939; key: 36; state: 0 (released)
sym: Return (65293), utf8: ‘’
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] leave: serial: 23118; surface: 3
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] enter: serial: 23120; surface: 3
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] modifiers: serial: 23120; group: 0
depressed: 00000000
latched: 00000000
locked: 00000010: Mod2
\[ 12: wl_data_device\] data_offer: id: 4278190081
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: STRING
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: TEXT
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: COMPOUND_TEXT
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: UTF8_STRING
\[4278190081: wl_data_offer\] offer: mime_type: text/plain;charset=utf-8
\[ 12: wl_data_device\] selection: id: 4278190081
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] modifiers: serial: 23121; group: 1
depressed: 00000000
latched: 00000000
locked: 00000010: Mod2
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] modifiers: serial: 23124; group: 0
depressed: 00000000
latched: 00000000
locked: 00000010: Mod2
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] key: serial: 23125; time: 13852659; key: 108; state: 1 (pressed)
sym: Alt_R (65514), utf8: ‘’
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] modifiers: serial: 23126; group: 0
depressed: 00000008: Mod1
latched: 00000000
locked: 00000010: Mod2
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] key: serial: 23127; time: 13853147; key: 10; state: 1 (pressed)
sym: 1 (49), utf8: ‘1’
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] key: serial: 23128; time: 13853227; key: 10; state: 0 (released)
sym: 1 (49), utf8: ‘’
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] key: serial: 23129; time: 13853323; key: 108; state: 0 (released)
sym: Alt_R (65514), utf8: ‘’
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] modifiers: serial: 23130; group: 0
depressed: 00000000
latched: 00000000
locked: 00000010: Mod2
\[ 16: wl_keyboard\] leave: serial: 23138; surface: 3
\[ 11: xdg_toplevel\] close
Here, I started wev, selected the us-symbolic profile on the desktop menu bar, then I pressed Alt-Gr + 1, which should be the superscript 1 from page 3 of the keyboard layout, finally I used the hot corner of the display and the mouse to close the wev utility. Who knows, maybe this is helpful. I went down the wev rabbit hole from the Arch Wiki and looking for how my laptop’s RGB functions controller works but did not get anywhere.
Last issue I have here is regarding the hold shift feature. I am constantly holding shift in FreeCAD to manipulate the view. The menu keeps popping up telling me about the 8+ second hold feature enabling slow scrolling or something like that. If I select the option to turn it off, I get the same message again an hour later and it just keeps on happening. I do not see anything in the system settings that disable this. IMO that should never happen. If I am stuck with some new setting, it should be an obvious and intuitive config in the System Settings with a way to absolutely disable it. Fishing for terminal stuff in the middle of a CAD project wastes my whole day.
This keyboard stuff is the worst experience I have had on Fedora in several years of Silverblue and now Workstation. I have wasted several hours chasing it on my own before posting this. Some of that was on me, attempting to figure out both the issue and how I might create my own keyboard profile, however I made no settings changes or configurations as I was never able to resolve the initial issue. I am not stating this to whine or make anyone feel bad. There is no chance my folks or most friends would continue or consider using an OS with this issue and the frustration of having no way of addressing any of it in the system settings GUI. Even for me, nothing about the keyboard settings even indicates where to look. There is no basic wayland manpage, only Xwayland and that seems super convoluted and confusing. The gsettings stuff is a train wreck too, like with:
\~$ gsettings list-schemas | grep -i key
org.freedesktop.ibus.general.hotkey
org.gnome.desktop.a11y.keyboard
org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.keyboard
org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings
org.gnome.libgnomekbd.keyboard
org.gnome.mutter.keybindings
org.gnome.mutter.wayland.keybindings
org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys
org.gnome.shell.keybindings
… what is a11y, or what is mutter. If I am offline and I only have manpage docs, I am screwed here. $ man a11y does not exist. $ man mutter is an irrelevant distraction. I am not aware of any offline decryption dictionary that will tell me what packages correspond to functionality in Gnome so that I know where to look for issues. $ apropos keyboard only brings up X11 based stuff, and that is a blind rabbit hole that leads nowhere. Just the tedious nature of navigating the gsettings schemas and keys is kinda crap. Enabling and disabling Gnome Tweaks when there are issues like this only adds to the uncertainty and distrust. Gnome has seen much better days in the past but this is an untenable mess IMO.
We need better offline documentation. The world is going to ECH instead of DNS and that is the death of the internet and privacy. YT just went ECH only yesterday. As far as I understand it, ECH basically means implicitly trusting all packets from a connection without any DNS info. So anyone could be forwarded or acting as a proxy in the middle, and there is no way of detecting it. This means trusting the stalkerware privateer data slavers that sell your digital person to manipulate and exploit you. It is like ripping your front door off your digital home by making firewalls obsolete and ineffective. I’d rather give up the internet than be a slave like that. If the internet died today, would users still have a working machine. Trust is the primary tool of fascists; transparency is required for democracy. If you run a whitelist DNS firewall this issue is obvious and a big deal. Otherwise, you are probably not even aware that you have been using ECH and it is stealing your future right now. Anyways, thanks for coming to my TED talk.
under your last/mentioned comment.