Comment 32 for bug 531173

Showing the selected keyboard layout with a popup is a serious usability regression from the previous behavior - instead of simply looking up to verify that you switched to the correct layout, you'd have to move your mouse over to a small area (and not even in a corner so Fitt's law does not apply); and worse - you'd have to click the small target?

That basically means that the operation of "changing the layout and verifying that it is what you want" - that multi-lingual people do many times in the course of writing a single document - goes from about 0.5 a second to 15 or even 20 seconds!

Note: all this is fine, and you know what - its even fine for Ubuntu developers to ignore it (it is open source after all, I'm sure they'll apply a patch I send to fix this), but the thing is - as it is documented on several other gnome-settings-daemon bugs - the keyboard layout indicator support isn't working either!