Occasionally (but regularly) it happens that all of a sudden Plasma loses my keyboard config, which means that my CapsLock key is CapsLock again, and my key repeat rate and speed are back to glacial. There is no special thing that I'm doing at that time. It happened right now as I was editing a text file in a Konsole.

Once my config is lost, making any changes in Settings/Input Methods/Keyboard has no effect at all until I log out.

Does anybody have an idea why this could happen? And how I can restore my config after it lost it without logging out?

Sorry, I have to correct myself: The keyboard config was working from when I installed Debian last week, but just now KDE forgot my config, and even a reboot couldn't get it back -- which is new. I have to use setxkbmap and xset now, which is OK, but the entire thing remains very strange.

Any ideas?

Hi!

Next time it happens, have a look at `journalctl -xe` which opens the journal at the last entry and is scrollable with PgUp. Perhaps there is a service throwing errors/warnings which may lead to the issue itself.

What kind of keyboard do you have? Did you enable keyboard layout change on switch/hotkey? How did you modify your keyboard keys? XModmap? GUI? Have you ibus installed? Does `localectl` show the correct layout?

Thanks for your suggestions! As it is now, my Plasma keyboard config hasn't returned yet, and rebooting doesn't change that.

koffeinfriedhof wrote:Next time it happens, have a look at `journalctl -xe` which opens the journal at the last entry and is scrollable with PgUp. Perhaps there is a service throwing errors/warnings which may lead to the issue itself.

Unfortunately, yesterday isn't included in the log, probably because I had to reboot this morning. Is that log persisted somewhere, or is it just in memory?

What kind of keyboard do you have? Did you enable keyboard layout change on switch/hotkey? How did you modify your keyboard keys? XModmap? GUI? Have you ibus installed? Does `localectl` show the correct layout?

I have no shortcut for switching layouts, and also only one layout "de - nodeadkeys" available. By "my config" I refer to everything under Settings/InputMethods/Keyboard, where I changed Keyboard Repeat under Hardware, and Caps Lock Behavior under Advanced. No idea how Plasma does it. As for locatectl,

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cassiopeia:~# localectl
   System Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8
       VC Keymap: n/a
      X11 Layout: de
       X11 Model: pc105
     X11 Variant: nodeadkeys
     X11 Options: compose:menu,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp


Right now I've put

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setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
xset r rate 250 35

into my .login, which works just as well. I just found it strange that the keyboard settings could simply revert out of the blue and not be restored. (I also have problems with my application launching shortcut keys, but I'm kind of resigned about that.)

ralphb wrote:…Is that log persisted somewhere, or is it just in memory?

You can list all available boots and then choose one with -b, where the number is -1 for the last boot, -4 for the fourth and so on:

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journalctl --list-boots
journalctl -b -1 -p warning  # all warnings and errors of previous boot


As for locatectl…

Looks good, but your `setxkbmap`-command chooses different options, missing Compose-key and ctrl_alt_bksp (Xorg-Killer).

…strange that the keyboard settings could simply revert out of the blue and not be restored. (I also have problems with my application launching shortcut keys, but I'm kind of resigned about that.)

Well, if you'll look on the partly fourty year old Keyboard-handling, you'll be not surprised There is a lot of mapping in the background which can of course break under some circumstances. And Qt-based works not like GTK-based.

Plasma stores the GUI-selected options in ~/.config/kxkbrc, so perhaps you want to remove this and use a xmodmap or a custom layout, depending on what you want to edit once started. I'm using a custom layout for years which makes no problems if correctly set up. Well, thats not true. It did make problems in Plasma as the Hyper-key (Meta, Super, Hyper like in the old days or at lisp machines) isn't implemented. But changing everything to only use Super did work.

As you mentioned Debian. Do you use a nearly current release of Qt and Plasma? If you are still on Qt5.11/5.12 (oldstable) you must upgrade as there are a lot of Screen errors not fixed.

I'm using Debian stable, i.e., version 11.

I checked all logs covering the 27th, and while I found many interesting things (such as confirmation that nouveau crashed the kernel), I didn't find any information about the keyboard config.

But fortunately I have a workaround, so I'm not too worried. But thanks for your help!