Re: How can we change the keyboard layout?
On Tue 06 Feb 2024 at 11:28:11 (+0100), hw wrote:
> On Mon, 2024-02-05 at 22:25 -0600, David Wright wrote:
> > On Tue 06 Feb 2024 at 00:11:43 (+0100), hw wrote:
> > [...]
> > > How can it be so difficult to get basic things like that right? It
> > > still sucks because after more then 30 years, we still don't have a
> > > good way to change the keyboard layouts!
> >
> > I presume you're now talking about wayland, though I don't think it's
> > been around for 30 years.
>
> I'm talking about wayland all the time; you brought Xorg up instead.
If that concerned you unduly, you could have put that in the Subject
line. It's also obvious that "change the keyboard layout" is ambiguous,
and you didn't intend to mean switching between two layouts.
> Keyboards are around for more than 30 years, and they have always been
> troublesome. I'm finding it amazing that there were no features added
> over time, like the ability to actually have more keys and every
> keyboard giving information about itself to the computer. If displays
> were like keyboards, we'd still be trying to figure out modelines
> manually.
My 2014 keyboard appears to identify itself correctly as a K520. My
old IBM M says it's an "AT Translated Set 2 keyboard", which seems
reasonable for a keyboard dating from 1988.
In 26 years, the number of keys has increased considerably, from 102
to 107, plus six audiovisual buttons. Two of the extra keys are
shifting ones (win and fn).
> We're still trying to figure out keyboards manually. Instead of
> improvements, we now have come so far that we even can't do that at
> all now.
I'm guessing that criticism is specific to wayland.
> > > Xorg doesn't seem to be maintained anymore and is on the way out.
> > >
> > > So how do you change the keyboard layout when using wayland?
> >
> > I've no idea. I don't seem to have noticed that X is on the way out.
>
> It is. Apparently nobody wants to maintain it anymore, and Fedora
> seems to have plans to omit it entirely for next release (which is
> like 4 months away). And it makes perfect sense to omit it.
I haven't seen a reference for this. I have seen references
that say something quite different.
> I'm sure others will follow. It's only that an up to it's date Debian
> is already outdated so badly that you can't even get an AMD graphics
> card to work which was released a year ago. Maybe that's why Debian
> users haven't noticed yet.
>
> Already 20 years ago Debian was so outdated that I had to run testing
> even on servers, and that's one of the reasons why I'm very reluctant
> to use it for servers now. Unfortunately, that leaves no good
> alternative for servers.
I can't make heads or tails of this. I don't know whether you have
some unique problems with running Debian: you certainly seem to have
an awful lot of them.
Cheers,
David.
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