Keyboard layout from lockscreen doesn't carry over to session
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unity |
Opinion
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
Upon testing the fix for Bug #1291461 "Lockscreen: keyboard layout switching shortcuts not working" I discovered that the changes made to keyboard layout on the lockscreen doesn't carry over to session. I consider it as highly confusing and bad behavior.
This is how I discovered that:
1. Set keyboard layout to Persian
2. Lock the screen
3. Change keyboard layout to Polish or English
4. Unlock the screen
In that moment I verified that Bug #1291461 is fixed but when I started typing my comment instead of Polish or English I saw Persian letters. That was entirely unexpected for me and it should be considered atleast as inconsistent behavior.
Why inconsistent? Because the keyboard layout carries over from session to lockscreen but it doesn't from lockscreen to session.
How to reproduce:
1. Set keyboard layout to Persian
2. Lock the screen
3. Change keyboard layout to Polish or English
4. Unlock the screen
5. Observe that layout is set to Persian
6. Lock the screen again
7. Notice the layout is set to Persian
This behavior is very confusing and it forces users to constantly shuffle through keyboard layouts.
| Christopher Townsend (townsend) wrote | #1 |
| Changed in unity: | |
| status: | New → Opinion |
| Donarsson (benjamin-schwarz) wrote | #2 |
This is the scenario we were trying to avoid (and I think is correct):
Say a user's normal keyboard layout is Arabic, but they are typing some document in English in their session. They leave the machine for enough time the lock screen pops up. Since the password is in Arabic, but the keyboard was set for English, they need to change to Arabic in order to unlock, but would probably want the session to remain in English.
My take is that there is some reason why the session keyboard is set to something different than the default which is what the password is set to. I think changing the keyboard in the lock screen is just for getting the correct password.
If people can come up with reasons why you'd want to use the lock screen to change your session keyboard instead of the session itself, please comment in this bug.
Hope this makes sense. Changing this to Opinion for now, but open for discussion.