Lightdm-gtk-greeter should use English layout on boot, not the one set in the installer

adalisk-emikhaylov commented 4 months ago

Describe the bug

After choosing Xfce and a non-English keyboard layout in the installer, I get that layout on boot (in lightdm-gtk-greeter) instead of English, and unable to input a password in English.

Steps To Reproduce

Boot into the graphical installer (I used nixos-gnome-23.11.5511.f091af045dff-x86_64-linux.iso in VirtualBox).
Choose Xfce as the DE.
Choose a non-English layout (I chose Russian).
Notice that this layout kicks in immediately - which looks like bad UX to me, since the username and password will usually be in English.
Manually switch to English layout (the button in top-right corner).
Set a password in English.
Finish installation, boot.
Notice that the custom non-English layout is enabled, and there's no way to switch to the English one. Hence no way to input the password, so you're locked out of the system.

Expected behavior

The chosen layout shouldn't be enabled by default in lightdm-gtk-greeter, it should always use English.

This is what the other distros I tried are doing (some had this bug in the past, like Xubuntu, but fixed it since).

Notify maintainers

@davidak @bobby285271 (pinging Lightdm maintainers, I hope this is correct)

Metadata

[holyblackcat@nixos:~]$ nix-shell -p nix-info --run "nix-info -m"
 - system: `"x86_64-linux"`
 - host os: `Linux 6.1.82, NixOS, 23.11 (Tapir), 23.11.5511.f091af045dff`
 - multi-user?: `yes`
 - sandbox: `yes`
 - version: `nix-env (Nix) 2.18.1`
 - nixpkgs: `/nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos`

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lolbinarycat commented 4 months ago

it seems like you would want a way to switch keyboard layouts from the login screen, to prevent this or the inverse (having non-english characters in your password and being unable to login).

the default lock screen used by the default nixos plasma install has a virtual keyboard built in, i presume for exactly this reason.

adalisk-emikhaylov commented 4 months ago

@lolbinarycat The inverse is far less likely. I don't think anybody in the right mind would have non-English characters in the password (how would you input them in the console (as in the ctrl+alt+f1..7 one), for example).

Unless they don't know any better, and are presented with a non-English layout in the installer.

lolbinarycat commented 4 months ago

do virtual terminals not respect the current keyboard layout?

one situation that is possible is logging in, changing the input method to something like japanese, then closing the lid of your laptop. this happened to me, and i had to use the virtual keyboard to log in.

NixOS / nixpkgs