keyboard layout variant won't stick (resets when new devices plug in, and on startup)

[Timo Paulssen]

Greetings,

I use the de-neo keyboard layout all day every day. It differs quite
strongly from the regular de layout (think of it like dvorak or
colemak). It has reached the point where I'm having a hard time typing
regular de. This is why this problem is getting on my nerves.

Here's the symptoms:

Whenever I plug in an input device - wacom touchpad, steam controller,
usb mouse, ... - or switch from a console back to X, i get the regular
de keyboard layout back, and i have to type "setxkbmap de neo" in some
terminal.

I set the de-neo via localectl, which among other things wrote the
following content to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-keyboard.conf:

    # Read and parsed by systemd-localed. It's probably wise not to edit
this file
    # manually too freely.
    Section "InputClass"
            Identifier "system-keyboard"
            MatchIsKeyboard "on"
            Option "XkbLayout" "de"
            Option "XkbVariant" "neo"
    EndSection

I can tell that this configuration gets picked up by the X server,
because whenever i plug in a keyboard-like device, i see this in my xorg
log:

    (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev"
    (**) Option "xkb_model" "neo"
    (**) Option "xkb_layout" "de"

I have no clue how to continue hunting down this problem. It doesn't
help that I run the same distro (fedora workstation 23) on my desktop,
where everything works just fine with - as far as i can tell - the same
config. The laptop is a Thinkpad T440s, if that's interesting.

I hope this list is the right place to ask about this. If not, please
feel free to send me somewhere else. Looking forward to your insights,
dear subscribers.
  - Timo Paulssen