While playing around with Lubuntu in a virtual machine I came across an annoying UX flaw. There is absolutely no way to set up keyboard layout switching in Lubuntu. I use this feature all the time on Windows and Mac to switch between QWERTY and AZERTY layouts. On Windows, this is done with a keyboard shortcut: ALT+SHIFT. On Mac there’s a little switch on the menu bar. To make this work on Linux, however, we’ll need to hop into a Terminal:

setxkbmap -option grp:ctrl_shift_toggle us,be

This causes CTRL+SHIFT to switch between US and Belgian keyboard layouts. Admittedly not extremely user friendly, but if you’re setting up Linux in a virtual machine, you’re probably not a novice user.

Back to work now .