Relevant forum thread: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=8135 I recently updated to 4.10 from 4.8 and everything seems ok except one thing. It seems that functionality from xkb-plugin was removed to make it work better with Settings->keyboard which is great. But commit fb667951 removed TOO MUCH. It removed the ability to change/toggle between the available layouts by pressing eg alt+shift. This functionality removal isn't mentioned in the commit message and I think it is an oversight. Since this functionality wasn't/isn't implemented in Settings->Keyboard, it should be left untouched in the xkb-plugin. Currently there is NO WAY to change between the layouts by using a keyboard combination. The user has to click on the plugin. This isn't acceptable. Moreover there is one serious side-effect: Users can get locked out of their desktop. Let's say you have 2 layouts configured: english and greek. Let's say that you write a document in greek but you have to close your laptop lid to change rooms. When the lid closes the screen locks(xlock). You open the lid and you try to input your password which is in english. You fail to do this, because the layout is in greek and you cannot use alt+shift to change layouts in the background. The only option here is to forcefully reboot your laptop and possibly lose your work on the document/report you were writing!
Where did you get 0.7.0 version from? The release notes for xfce-xkb-plugin 0.7.0 state that: a) This is a development release b) it should not be used with xfce 4.8 or 4.10 c) it requires xfce4-settings 4.11 or later Assuming you got 0.7.0 through your package manager, you need to contact your distro maintainer to fix this for you. Depending on their policy, they should probably either update the rest of xfce to the dev versions or switch to the latest non-dev release of xfce-xkb-plugin (0.5.6 at this moment)
Pfff this seems really odd. I am using Debian sid, which has 0.5.6 as latest but Debian testing has 0.7.0 wtf! I know that I have both repos enabled with apt pinning prefering sid. I don't know how testing was chosen. I will try to downgrade and inform you.
Hmm, this seems to have been noticed by the maintainers 3 days ago. So they uploaded 0.5.6. Relevant link: http://packages.qa.debian.org/x/xfce4-xkb-plugin/news/20130620T210907Z.html I installed 0.5.6 and now it works correctly.