Keyboard layout settings are no longer working

[skyfishgoo]

was going into settings > input devices > keyboard and choosing a keyboard layout such as en (US, symbolic) in order to get symbols under the ISO Shift key... also selected Right Alt for the shift key and Right Ctrl for compose key.

it worked long enough for me to map out where all the symbols were on my keyboard, but then it stopped working and no matter what i change the settings too, i'm back on bog standard en (US default).

there was even a time when the desktop was getting laggy and for a while i had no keyboard inputs at all showing on the screen.

what i've tried:

new user works fine with a new user, but oddly layout settings changes made in my main profile were also in the new user

restored timeshift image of the system from prior to my experimenting... no difference.

restored backintime copy of my entire /home dir... no difference

at a loss for how to get this working again.

[skyfishgoo]

also forgot to mention that i've renamed both

~/.config and ~/.local

to see if any of my settings were to blame and the problem persists.

it seems to have started around the time a ran

setxkbmap -layout us -print

without really knowing what it does.

[Snowhog]

AI Overview

To undo setxkbmap changes, the simplest method is to run setxkbmap -option to clear all temporary options, or use setxkbmap -layout us (or your default) to reset to a basic configuration; for permanent changes, you'll need to edit system files like /etc/default/keyboard.

Quick Fixes (Temporary/Session)

Clear Options: To remove all temporary options (like ctrl:nocaps):

setxkbmap -option

Reset to Default Layout: To revert to a standard US layout (or your usual):

setxkbmap -layout us


Permanent Fixes (System-Wide)

Edit /etc/default/keyboard (Debian/Ubuntu):

Open the file: sudo nano /etc/default/keyboard

Remove or comment out the XKBOPTIONS line (e.g., XKBOPTIONS="ctrl:nocaps").

Apply changes: sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration or reboot.

[skyfishgoo]

well the AI was right about some things...

setxkbmap -layout us

is only good for the session, and

/etc/default/keyboard

reflects the correct XKBOPTIONS

but it does not seem to control the layout and variant, for that i had to resort to manually editing

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf

in order to get the layout to persist after reboot, but it would not remember the modifier keys

so for that i needed to run

sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration

to get those to stick

however

so far the plasma settings GUI is still completely busted and nothing i do in there has any effect on anything except the contents of

~/.config/kxkbrc

which seems to be completely ignored by the system!

and

the keyboard layout switcher in the system tray is completely not working, nor can i choose among more than one layout with meta+alt+k

i think now that i've got the keyboard layout and modifier keys working again, i might go for another round of renaming

/.config and /.local to see if i can pinpoint what is causing these other two issues.

as i said everything works fine on a new acct, so it must be something in my /home dir.

EDIT: while a new user still works, my user profile persist with this issue after deleting the cache and renaming both .config and .local

so what else could be unique to my user but not in either of those directories?