Hey there!
My (Korean) wife’s notebook, an older LG gram, does not support Windows 10 anymore and I could convince her to switch to linux.
A few years ago, she used my notebook with Linux Mint and I had to set up and configure everything to enable her to switch the Keyboard between English and Hangul. Honestly, it didn’t work that great. I didn’t know what I was doing, because I never used a dual layout keyboard and she felt like switching layout was somehow strange and felt weird.
I thought maybe there is a distribution, that supports that out of the box. The only south korean distro I found is HamoniKR. Does someone have experience with it?
Or can someone recommend a distro that supports multiple keyboard layouts very well?
The OS language does not need to be Korean, english is totally fine. Only the keyboard layout should be easy to switch. I mostly use Debian based distributions. Therefore it would be the easiest for me to support, but something Redhat based should also work out.
Desktop wise, something similar to Windows as the default desktop would be nice. Cinnamon should work fine (seems to be HarmoniKR’s default) or KDE Plasma.
Thanks in advance for good your tipps and advices!
Red star OS is best OS for democratic peoples Republic of Korea!
By the way your next generation is going to be 34% the size of your current one. You guys got to take some time off work.
I’ve tried two different setups for Hangul input.
The first combination (GNOME+X11+IBus) just worked—it was trivial to setup from the GNOME Control Center and there were no issues that I could find. Last time I tried this was around a year ago but it had been working for years before that.
The second combination (Plasma+Wayland+IBus) barely worked: I could enter characters but couldn’t add space or other symbols between characters, and settings were all over the place and would randomly stop working. Last tested ten minutes ago.
I’ve heard people getting better results on Plasma+Wayland+Fcitx5 but it’s not something I’ve tried.
Annyeong haseyo!
Can’t go wrong with Debian.
True! Most stable system I ever used.
All Korean keyboards, including the one on my LG Gram (which is a Korean model), have a dedicated key for switching between English and Korean (the “한영키”). Everyone who isn’t technically inclined uses this key. Using Ctrl + Space is a bad user experience.
You’re right! I just checked and it was a dedicated key to switch the layout. That makes it easier!
I think one thing that bothered my wife when she used my notebook was the keyboard shortcut to switch the language.
Can’t you just keybind the switch to that key? I use arch and I have keyboard layout switch between three languages (one is Japanese which might have similar tech/typing style), and the program I use (ibus anthy) allows me to define my keybind.
You’re right!
Hello fellow AI.
lol.
If you’re okay with ibus-hangul, you can configure the keyroard shortcut for Gram.
Click “Add” and press “한/영” key on the keyboard.
ibus
Re: cinnamon: This guy has some videos on how to set up multiple keyboards and set a shortcut to change between them.
Can’t speak to hamonikr.
Adding new keyboard languages https://youtu.be/jbKVfZ6M0c8?t=46s
Setting keyboard language change shortcut https://youtu.be/omdUhZ489PE?t=27s
Best of luck and remember that there’s always a learning curve with these things
Thanks! I’ll check out the videos.
Just a heads up, I havent looked into it for a year, but back then CJK input was completely non functional on wayland.
Ok apparently there has been progress.
At the beginning of this year it was working, even if a bit buggy, according to this talk. The talk also provides a good overview of all the subsystems involved.
KDE Plasma on Wayland and Fcitx5 has been working beautifully for me
I think KDE Plasma supports just about every keyboard layout in existence. It even supports the Esperanto layout, which I have never seen before. Pick a distro with Plasma and choose the right layout during setup.
안녕하세요!
i personally use slackware, nabi for xim imhangul-gtk2/3 for gtk and qimhangul-qt5 (peremen) for qt. meaning i don’t have korean input for qt6 or gtk4.
ibus kinda seemed to work but had numerous glitches, same for fcitx but worse, uim made gtk2/3 programs hang. i’m honestly not sure how other korean users are doing it. i’ve heard good stuff about harmonikr, but not entirely sure how it’s much different from debian ubuntu etc.
also ensure xkeyboard layout is korean and the Hangul key doesn’t identify as Alt_R in xev, some IMs don’t like it.
Thx.
Sounds like the setup can be quite complicated. ;)
I might need to dive into that topic.
these days i’m thinking my setup is kinda weird, maybe slackware 15.0’s old glibc version is causing issues or something. i recommend you try debian or ubuntu’s latest version. ibus/fcitx/uim seems to be the most widely used choice. nobody seems to be using nabi or imhangul-gtk2/3…
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ibus and KDE Plasma do NOT correlate together considering it was aimed for GTK, Mr. ChatGPT
Thanks ChatGPT.
Thank you clanker
Now, Mint should support the need decently enough, although it takes some setup. You can look up for language setup settings, I found that fctix works well nowadays.
That depends on your preferences
Sure, it always does.
I’m fine choosing the best fitting distro from all these points mentioned in the post you linked.
Unfortunately the post does not cover the only question I have: Is there a distro with specially good multi Keyboard layout support.
For most people - including myself - this is never an issue, because they use only one layout. But especially people from countries with non latin alphabets really need this.
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Red star os/s
I get this is meant as a joke. But it can come across quite insulting
No, thx.
