GDM defaults to US over Dvorak regardless of order or previous selection
Greetings, I have been scouring the net trying to find how to do this properly and believe this to be a bug. While this may be related to #461 (moved) or #459, I think my rigorous testing of this may be useful to the Devs. I both made the changes and logged off and made the changes and powered cycled from the gnome session to confirm this behaviour. I originally manually edited the 00-keyboard.conf file, but then only used localectl with and without the the --no-convert flag. All of this is on a fresh install of Arch Linux.
The problem here is that when given the us and dvorak options, gdm will select us regardless of the order. The reason this is problematic is that GDM does not remember your last selection when you power cycle or log off and always defaults to the wrong (i.e. us) layout. I will note that it does remember if you just lock your screen.
| Package | Version |
|---|---|
| gdm | 3.30.2-2 |
| xorg-server | 1.20.3-1 |
| wayland | 1.16.0-1 |
| Command | 00-keyboard.conf (relevant lines) | Dropdown Options | GDM Default/Layout | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| localectl set-x11-keymap dvorak | Option "XkbLayout" "dvorak" | (NONE since there is only one) | us (because dvorak is not a valid X keymap but rather a variant) | since the keymap is invalid, gdm should default to us |
| localectl set-x11-keymap us,us "" dvorak, | Option "XkbLayout" "us,us" Option "XkbVariant" "dvorak," |
en1: dvorak en2: us |
en2: us | in X the first (i.e. dvorak) would have been the default. this demonstrates the bug |
| localectl set-x11-keymay us,us "" ,dvorak | Option "XkbLayout" "us,us" Option "XkbVariant" ",dvorak" |
en1: us en2: dvorak |
en1: us | this shows the order is not the issue |
| localectl set-x11-keymay us "" dvorak | Option "XkbLayout" "us" Option "XkbVariant" "dvorak" |
(NONE since there is only one) | dvorak | this shows that dvorak can work as the default |
I would also like to note that the gnome session also selects us regardless of order after a fresh install, cp of 00-keyboard.conf, and boot but this isn't a big issue because once you change the layout it remembers it even after logoff or power cycle.