It seems I've stumbled across a better workaround: this did work for a Ubuntu 14.04 Gnome and 14.04 Unity (which had Gnome Shell installed in parallel and was started into Gnome Shell).
I've selected German Neo 2 as first keyboard layout and plain German as second. After selecting Neo and rebooting, in the login-screen there are still only German and English available as layouts (didn't find a way to change that) - but after logging in, Neo is automatically selected, and all keys seem to work. Note that I've stayed away from switching to another layout since then as I guess that would make keys infunctional again. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to xkeyboard-config in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1404468 Title: German neo2 keyboard layout: no ALT and SUPER keys Status in xkeyboard-config package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Bug description: Affected version: Ubuntu 14.04. When switching to the Neo 2 keyboard layout, I cannot use the ALT or SUPER keys at all. To reproduce this bug, do the following: - In the keyboard system tray menu, select "Text Entry" - Click "+" - Select: "Germany (Neo 2)" - Close the "Text Entry" configuration - In the keyboard system tray menu, (temporarily) select "Germany (Neo 2)" as active layout. Now, shortcuts like <ALT>+<TAB>, <ALT>+<F2>, ... are no longer working. The same goes for the shortcuts I tried with <SUPER>. Switching to Neo2 by "setxkbmap de neo" has the same result. For sake of completeness: There are other bug reports regarding Neo2, reporting that Layer4 (Mod4) is not working. In my case, Mod4 seems to be working fine. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xkeyboard-config/+bug/1404468/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp