German neo2 keyboard layout: no ALT and SUPER keys

[Mail-fabian-keller]

Affected version: Ubuntu 14.04.

When switching to the Neo 2 keyboard layout, I cannot use the ALT or SUPER keys at all. To reproduce this bug, do the following:

- In the keyboard system tray menu, select "Text Entry"
- Click "+"
- Select: "Germany (Neo 2)"
- Close the "Text Entry" configuration
- In the keyboard system tray menu, (temporarily) select "Germany (Neo 2)" as active layout.

Now, shortcuts like <ALT>+<TAB>, <ALT>+<F2>, ... are no longer working. The same goes for the shortcuts I tried with <SUPER>.

Switching to Neo2 by "setxkbmap de neo" has the same result.

For sake of completeness: There are other bug reports regarding Neo2, reporting that Layer4 (Mod4) is not working. In my case, Mod4 seems to be working fine.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[_F_ (ra-findling)]

Exact same behavior here: neo with Ubuntu Gnome 14.04, ALT and SUPER do not work, Mod4 does. This renders Ubuntu Gnome 14.04 unusable for neo users.

Does anybody know a workaround? Logging out and in again does not fix the problem for me (same behavior).

[_F_ (ra-findling)]

This seems to also affect F12. F12 is the default Yakuake shortcut: it works when called to manually assign the shortcut, but does not work as global shortcut to open Yakuake when called from elsewhere.

[_F_ (ra-findling)]

Actually this seems to affect every key that is not handled directly to the target application, but indirectly (through the window-manager?), e.g. also media buttons when the associated media application window is not focused.

I also seem to have stumbled over a workaround somehow: I'm using Ubuntu Gnome here, and after installing kubuntu-desktop (during installation I selected lightdm, not gdm) and starting into KDE once (there the affected buttons didn't work either), on next login the login screen changed to KDE-style (where you can choose the UI type). After logging in to Gnome again the buttons seem to work.

[_F_ (ra-findling)]

It seems I've stumbled across a better workaround: this did work for a Ubuntu 14.04 Gnome and 14.04 Unity (which had Gnome Shell installed in parallel and was started into Gnome Shell).

I've selected German Neo 2 as first keyboard layout and plain German as second. After selecting Neo and rebooting, in the login-screen there are still only German and English available as layouts (didn't find a way to change that) - but after logging in, Neo is automatically selected, and all keys seem to work. Note that I've stayed away from switching to another layout since then as I guess that would make keys infunctional again.

[vak (khamenya)]

It just happened to me that Alt-Tab suddenly stoped working in Ubuntu 15 under Neo2.
If switched from Neo2 to other layout -- Alt-Tab works again, switching back to Neo2 and it's not working.
Caveat: not sure though if it is an issue in xkeyboard-config !

[vak (khamenya)]

Alt-Tab is still not working from time to time in Neo2 :(