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Suddenly my external USB keyboard uses a different keyboard layout and -settings from the one builtin my laptop. The built-in keyboard uses the expected layout, even when the USB one is connected.

E.g. My builtin keyboard uses AltGr dead-keys, as is defined in "settings » Language and Region » Input source". This setting has only one layout listed. Yet, the USB keyboard does suddenly use dead-keys without alt-gr.

Another change, is that I have mapped CAPS to ESC: The built-in keyboard does this right, the external USB does not.

The keyboard and laptops are not new, it worked fine until yesterday. I did not install any kernel modules, drivers or new kernels knowingly.

Running and walking through sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration does not fix the issue.

  1. Is it possible -at all- to have different connected keyboards to use different layouts in Ubuntu? If so, where is this defined? This might help me troubleshoot further and disable this.
  2. What could have changed in software that causes this? Should I hunt down bugs, dmesg or /var/log/syslog issues that are indicating some problem?
berkes
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  • Resetting everything in `org.gnome.desktop.input-sources` back to defaults, solved the issue. I did not change anything there knowlingly, other than `org.gnome.desktop.input-sources xkb-options "['caps:escape']`, but many settings were non-standard according to dconf. Not sure how this happened, but either with some update, or through some application, settings were changed to allow different input-sources who did not have any keyboards mapped, suddenly. – berkes Oct 15 '20 at 12:21

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I'm having a similar problem on Ubuntu 20.04. It seems that recently a bug was introduced in GNOME that causes this, it's being investigated in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/3299.

If you're using GNOME, I'm positive that your issues are caused by this bug as well.

A quick workaround is to restart the shell after plugging in the external keyboard by pressing Alt-F2, r, return.

Marian Rainer-Harbach
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  • Thanks. I'm happy to learn it is a bug that others experience too. I thought it was something in my setup because I could not find a bug-report. – berkes Oct 20 '20 at 09:28
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    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-shell/+bug/1899206 appears to track this issue on the Ubuntu side – leezu Nov 12 '20 at 23:41