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
    8·
    10 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.org
      3·
      10 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.

  • HelloRoot@lemy.lolEnglish
    7·
    10 months ago

    Just a heads up, I havent looked into it for a year, but back then CJK input was completely non functional on wayland.

    Ok apparently there has been progress.

    https://archive.fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-6533-status-of-cjk-input-system-in-wayland/

    At the beginning of this year it was working, even if a bit buggy, according to this talk. The talk also provides a good overview of all the subsystems involved.

  • sjohannes@programming.devEnglish
    3·
    10 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
    2·
    10 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.

  • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBanned
    45·
    10 months ago

    Red star OS is best OS for democratic peoples Republic of Korea!

    By the way your next generation is going to be 34% the size of your current one. You guys got to take some time off work.

    • lens0021@programming.dev
      1·
      10 months ago

      What? I never heard that OS before though I am living in Korea. What are the pros of the OS? Does it have a native support for Kakao Talk?

      • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBanned
        1·
        10 months ago

        Oh it’s a joke. Red star OS is a Linux distro made by the North Korean government. It’s most definitely has spyware in it. Probably not as much as American companies but it does contain spyware and I think it takes a picture of your screen every so often like copilot does.

        • lens0021@programming.dev
          1·
          10 months ago

          Mine is also a joke. KakaoTalk, the most used massenger app in South Korea does not support Linux, a Wine approch is half-broken, and a WIP reverse-engineered Typescript & Rust based open-source client is not yet fully developed and never.

          • DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zoneBanned
            1·
            10 months ago

            I would avoid using stuff that goes out of its way to not support Linux. I guess it’s popular. Most things do work under Linux once you figure out how to use it. You have proton, wine, and VMs and containers if the former don’t work.

            I think you may have replied to the wrong person though I was the one replying about red star OS the North Korean Linux distro