GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 721206
gdm should not always display English (US) keyboard layout
Last modified: 2021-07-05 14:24:18 UTC
On my system, I have deleted the English (US) keyboard layout in Anaconda and replaced in with English (Dvorak). However, gdm displays both keyboard layouts as available. It should not be presenting a layout that I explicitly removed, and which gnome-shell recognizes is unavailable.
Seeing the same on 3.12 beta. On 3.10 (system with 2 user accounts) I've tried removed the US settings/changed them to UK via gnome-control-center -> Region & Language -> Login Screen but GDM still shows the switcher including a US layout. On 3.12 (one user account) I had to resort to trying xhost +SI:localuser:gdm && sudo gdm dbus-launch gnome-control-center as the Login Screen button isn't shown... In that case, Region & Language initially shows US English for Language and Formats, and shows English (UK) and English (US) under Input Sources. Reconfiguring there seems to persist (closing and launching again shows the same settings) but after killing the session (via loginctl kill-session) they've reverted to their initial settings.
rtcm: mcatanzaro: we always add 'us' at the end of the list so that people don't get themselves into a situation where they can't login Fair enough
I respectfully disagree with rtcm's rationale. Preventing user lockout as a result of the incorrect keyboard can be achieved without having the US layout permanently displayed on GDM. Example alternative: when changing the keyboard layout for the login screen, insist on "please enter your password to confirm these login screen changes, to ensure your password works with the new layout". Or even better: just leave the old layout as secondary on GDM *until the first successful login* after the change. Or have a freeform "change layout" on GDM. This as far as I can see should be possible anyway. Use case: second user changes their locale, then password, in Gnome. Logs out, can't log in again because they didn't add their layout to the GDM options. In fact, based on this, GDM should actually just show the layouts for the locale of every user with a password, automatically. What about if the keyboard was already set to a non en-US layout when the user's password was created? For example with Gnome initial setup? In that case the layout's already known-good! Summary: the current setup kind of just feels like "America, fuck yeah" to me, to be honest (excuse the French) and I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not the only one - and the "so that people don't get themselves into a situation where they can't login" argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny. £0.013 ;)
It is pretty arbitrary to pick US English to be always present. That's obviously not useful at all for anyone with a keyboard that isn't US English. Still, having it on the bottom of the list is harmless. This came up today because it's being selected by default in 3.16 by mistake, which is much more annoying and being worked on.
Fair enough re. harmlessness, but that doesn't make this a notabug I think for the reasons given above - can you change the status back to open?
Since it's intended behavior I'll mark it as an Enhancement bug. FWIW I agree that if an admin user deletes this keyboard layout, it doesn't make sense to display it.
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