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!

  • соисüѕѕэd@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    12 days ago

    Fedora is a solid option as it uses IBus by default and ships the ibus-hangul package in its repositories. The KDE Plasma spin provides a Windows‑style taskbar and a very configurable input‑method switcher. To setup the keyboard in KDE, just run: sudo dnf install ibus-hangul

    Then open System Settings → Input Devices → Keyboard → Layouts. Click Add → Korean (Hangul). You can then set the shortcut (e.g., Ctrl + Space or Alt + Shift) under Advanced → Switching Policy.

    Plasma’s Keyboard Layout widget sits nicely on the panel, letting you toggle with a click—very similar to the Windows language bar.

    All in all, switching between English and Hangul is straightforward on most modern Linux distributions – you just need the right input‑method framework and a little configuration. You can also do similar setups with Ubuntu/Mint or openSUSE as well as HamoniKR.