Hello everyone!
I have been working on some fixes improvements to KXkb, the TDE keyboard tool and layout switcher¹. The fixes should make configuring keyboard layouts easier and should solve some long-standing issues with keyboard switching (e.g. Bugzilla issue #100).
One of the improvements that I have been thinking to include but for which I need user feedback concerns TDEPersonalizer, the wizard that gets shown on the first run of the desktop, or later, at users' choice. The first step of this wizard lets you choose your country and system language. The idea is that based on this information, the keyboard layouts will be conveniently set up for you with a sane default, with minimal need for user feedback (who can later adjust this default manually).
But the problem is that I am not sure what that default should be. If you consider, for example, cyrillic languages or greek, a good default, in my opinion, would be a combination of the standard latin layout (English) plus the layout of that language (so you have two layouts that you can switch between). If you take languages based on the latin alphabet though (e.g. Italian, French, Czech etc.) users might not
actually need a latin layout, so they will be fine with just the layout of the keyboard layout of their own language. A good solution IMO would be adding a checkbox just below country and language selection that would let you enable/disable the English layout. This checkbox would not be shown if the language you selected is already English (US, UK or any variant).
So, I am asking for your feedback, especially those of you who use non-English keyboard layouts: What do you think of this idea? Do you think the checkbox approach is good enough? What should be the default state of the checkbox, enable or disable English layout?
Please take in mind beginner Trinity users too.
Your feedback will be greatly appreciated!
-- Philippe MAVRIDIS
¹ The relevant pull request is here: https://mirror.git.trinitydesktop.org/gitea/TDE/tdebase/pulls/304
You can take a look at the discussion that has already happened thereif you want.
P.S. I've been having problems with GMail and the mailing list. This must be the fourth time I'm trying to send this e-mail. I'm resending this from the e-mail address that I have on ProtonMail.