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!

  • PussButton@lemmy.org
    4·
    2 days ago

    Just to be the annoying person and point it out: it’s Linux. Not windows. So things will feel weird or strange, for you (and the wife) will be learning a new OS. Give it time.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I understand what you mean, but I dont think that’s very helpful advice. He may have a limited ability to understand what she needs from her os as a dual language user, and as a non technical user she may not either in a way that’s helpful to him in trying to understand the options and setup process in front of him. A less technical user may not be able to communicate how or why something isn’t working the way they need, and he has no context or experience from which to infer.

      From a user experience standpoint, him being the person who understands linux and is more technical but having no familiarity with her use case is really difficult user situation, should the distro not support their needs particularly well out of the box.

      It seems entirely appropriate for him to be asking around on her behalf about what might best fit her use case, given he doesn’t have experience with it.

      • ibot@feddit.orgOP
        2·
        2 days ago

        He may have a limited ability to understand what she needs from her os as a dual language user, and as a non technical user she may not either in a way that’s helpful to him in trying to understand the options and setup process in front of him. A less technical user may not be able to communicate how or why something isn’t working the way they need, and he has no context or experience from which to infer.

        Yes, that’s exactly it. I can technically set it it up somehow. But I have no feeling for how the layout switch should work well.

        My wife on the other hand had problems to pinpoint what exactly make it feel unnatural when switching the layout. But as I figured out thx to another comment, many Korean keeboards have a dedicated key to switch the layout.

        My wife is a typer on the keyboard. And it might happen that she needs to switch the layout multiple times within a minute. Therefore this is something that should work without issues.

        • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 days ago

          I hope y’all are able to find a good solution on linux! If not it might be worth seeing if you could open some bug reports, it might help them make the experience better

          I have no idea how to do that kind of thing for big multi package projects like a distro though lol 😅

          Wishing yall the best, take care! ❤️

    • hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org
      2·
      2 days ago

      as a longtime korean linux/bsd user i can say all the available korean input IMs on X11 are half baked. so many glitches and inconsistencies. like in the middle of typing korean it suddenly switches to english and goes back normal after a few keystrokes etc