This is about the XKB patches found in my Big Bag Of Tricks (XKB) topic.

Well, in my download there's an instdiff.sh script that installs the XKB patch. I think I described well enough how to run it? But yeah, no double-click option.

Indeed, I've had problems too. Patching Ubuntu used to be a smooth and joyful experience, giving the layout and option choices (but not the model unfortunately) readily accessible in the menus. But lately I've tried several machines that crashed after I tried some settings, at least if I used the GUI settings panels! This happened several times using a GNOME3 Debian machine, but also on other machines.

The crashes could be very painful. I had to try reinstalling the system a few times! I've resorted to mainly activating my patches using the 'setxkb.sh' script in my tools folder that simply calls the setxkbmap command instead of using xconfig or dconf or what-have-you. That seems robust at least, but I miss the GUI and I don't want a set of patches that can potentially ruin my system!

But the patches are very complex by now and if I've made a mistake somewhere I can't find it. I'm not sure how to remediate this.

One thing I did was add a few commands to my install script so I wouldn't have to restart the computer after installing. They seemed to work well, but maybe they don't behave as expected in all settings?

I'm suspecting that there's a problem with the way the Linux environments handles keyboard settings these days. It's confusing, as the settings are stored in the dconf database for GNOME users but also for others and the old /etc/default/keyboard file is used sometimes but certainly not always? Also, the XKB server files in /var/lib/xkb/server-*.xkm seem to be ignored sometimes these days? I'm confused.

Does anyone here have similar experiences, or even a solution or explanation to offer?

I suppose I should take this to the Debian or XKB forums. But I'm asking here first just in case.