Hey there!

My (Korean) wife’s notebook, an older LG gram, does not support Windows 10 anymore and I could convince her to switch to linux.

A few years ago, she used my notebook with Linux Mint and I had to set up and configure everything to enable her to switch the Keyboard between English and Hangul. Honestly, it didn’t work that great. I didn’t know what I was doing, because I never used a dual layout keyboard and she felt like switching layout was somehow strange and felt weird.

I thought maybe there is a distribution, that supports that out of the box. The only south korean distro I found is HamoniKR. Does someone have experience with it?

Or can someone recommend a distro that supports multiple keyboard layouts very well?

The OS language does not need to be Korean, english is totally fine. Only the keyboard layout should be easy to switch. I mostly use Debian based distributions. Therefore it would be the easiest for me to support, but something Redhat based should also work out.

Desktop wise, something similar to Windows as the default desktop would be nice. Cinnamon should work fine (seems to be HarmoniKR’s default) or KDE Plasma.

Thanks in advance for good your tipps and advices!

  • lens0021@programming.dev
    6·
    4 months ago

    ​All Korean keyboards, including the one on my LG Gram (which is a Korean model), have a dedicated key for switching between English and Korean (the “한영키”). Everyone who isn’t technically inclined uses this key. Using Ctrl + Space is a bad user experience.

    • ibot@feddit.orgOP
      1·
      4 months ago

      You’re right! I just checked and it was a dedicated key to switch the layout. That makes it easier!

      I think one thing that bothered my wife when she used my notebook was the keyboard shortcut to switch the language.

      • lens0021@programming.dev
        2·
        4 months ago

        If you’re okay with ibus-hangul, you can configure the keyroard shortcut for Gram.

        Click “Add” and press “한/영” key on the keyboard.

        ibus

      • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 months ago

        Can’t you just keybind the switch to that key? I use arch and I have keyboard layout switch between three languages (one is Japanese which might have similar tech/typing style), and the program I use (ibus anthy) allows me to define my keybind.

  • sjohannes@programming.devEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    I’ve tried two different setups for Hangul input.

    The first combination (GNOME+X11+IBus) just worked—it was trivial to setup from the GNOME Control Center and there were no issues that I could find. Last time I tried this was around a year ago but it had been working for years before that.

    The second combination (Plasma+Wayland+IBus) barely worked: I could enter characters but couldn’t add space or other symbols between characters, and settings were all over the place and would randomly stop working. Last tested ten minutes ago.

    I’ve heard people getting better results on Plasma+Wayland+Fcitx5 but it’s not something I’ve tried.

  • daggermoon@lemmy.world
    1·
    4 months ago

    I think KDE Plasma supports just about every keyboard layout in existence. It even supports the Esperanto layout, which I have never seen before. Pick a distro with Plasma and choose the right layout during setup.