How Canonical thumbed its nose at the international Ubuntu community... and then fixed that

There's a lot of controversy around Canonical and its Ubuntu now. Unity, Wayland, commercial lenses in Dash - these are only few. Let me add to the list.

If you are American or English, you may close this browser window now. The rest of the article will not be interesting for you.

If you are not, you are very likely to have more than one keyboard layout in your system. This is because you have to type in your native language, as well as in English.

I have written recently about the options to configure multiple keyboard layouts in different Desktop Environments, including Unity.

I wrote the article using Ubuntu 13.04, where all the steps worked like a charm.

Things have changed since Ubuntu 13.10 came out – the charm became an evil spell.



One of the main features of your keyboard settings when you have more than one layout is an option to quickly switch between layouts using a hotkey. Different people prefer different hotkeys. Some of them use Ctrl-Shift (this is my preferred method), others use Shift-Shift, Alt-Shift, Alt-Space, and so on. Previous versions of Unity allowed you to choose one or many hotkeys to switch between the layouts.

This new version allows only one hotkey to switch in a forward direction, and another for the backwards direction. I would be OK with that, if it worked. After all, latest GNOME versions have the similar approach, and it works there.

Unfortunately, it does not work. The default hotkey in Ubuntu 13.10, when you select from the settings window, is Super-Space. If you try to use it, you get one of two effects: either the Dash will open, or a space will be entered in the text window. No change in the layout at all! The same story repeats if you try to change the hotkey.

The only combination that seems to work consistently in Unity is Ctrl-Space. That is a long way from the most preferred option of many users!

What is interesting is that Canonical and the Ubuntu community have known about this bug since August 2013! You can check when the bug 1218322 was reported.

It is almost 2 months since then, there have been more than 120 comments at the time I am writing this article, and there are still no plans to fix the bug in the Launchpad!

Just look at comment #84 in the discussion - and that is just one of many people who complain:

Forcing any change would be like forcing me to swap Y-Z after ~15 years of touch typing. I'd scream and uninstall Ubuntu for good.

Will this benefit Ubuntu and Canonical? I doubt it!

Let's see where it all leads us...

Update 24.10.2013: A bugfix was released on the 23rd of October. It seems to allow hotkey like Ctrl-Shift. I tested it, and it works. Although there is still an ongoing discussion in the bugreport about the other options to switch between the layouts.