Comment 298 for bug 36812

The GNOME issue is completely separate from the problem of "triggering layout change on press", as GNOME does not use the kxb behavior at all - it actually disables any options set using setxkbmap - instead it listens to keyboard events and implements its own custom behavior that mimics Mac OS.

Note that with the current release (19.10, but also tested 20.04) on Kubuntu with xserver 1.20 that *does not* include the patch from freedesktop.org bug 865, layout switching works on release - as requested. I'm not sure what introduced this behavior and whether it is in X.org or in KDE.