I have a Manjaro KDE Plasma (up to date) machine with a wireless Logitech keyboard. Recently, the caps lock key’s LED does not change on the keyboard when I press it. This is while on the OS level the state of the caps lock does change and the characters I type are typed in uppercase. But the light on the key does not change. I verified the keyboard is not the issue here since before I login to the user, the caps lock LED works perfectly fine. But as soon as I log into my account, the caps lock LED freezes in any state it is (on or off) and does not change any more.
What could the problem here?
I also have a problem with the NumLock which I think could be related to the same issue. As for the NumLock, after logging into my account, it’s always turned off and I have to turn it on if I want to use the number keys. This is while I set the NumLock option in the settings to “Leave unchanged”.
This could — emphasis — be due to some setup you have in your account in which those LEDs are used for displaying other things than the status of the toggle key in question. Only you will know whether you’ve set something up like that.
On the other hand, a wireless keyboard has its own logic built in, so there may be something specific to that keyboard model as well.
You have to set it to “enabled”, because the behavior of the keyboard in a desktop environment — whether running on top of X11 or on top of Wayland — is completely separate from its configuration outside of that environment.
However, that said, in Plasma concretely, you can set up the numerical keypad to always produce numbers (as in macOS), even when NumLock is off.
Thanks for the NumLock tip. I didn’t know about that.
Regarding the Caps Lock problem, you are most likely right. I play around with my systems all the time. The problem is that I have not idea which one could have cause such an issue. And I cannot trace back my steps to find the culprit (I cannot remember them). I was hoping someone here could guide me to the right direction where to look.
Thanks again.
The screenshot above also lists a few settings for the keyboard LEDs, so maybe you could investigate that on your own system?
Other than that, like I said, there are various ways to reprogram the keyboard LEDs, and various utilities — some of them from the AUR — for doing so. You may have installed one of those, but as I wrote higher up, only you know what you’ve done on your system, and there’s no way for us to tell.
