Hello! My girlfriend bought a new pc, an HP pavilion x360 with the touchscreen, and asked me to install her kubuntu as in her previous non-tablet pc, and so I did. It works very well, except for the fact that I tried really hard without success to setup a virtual keyboard. fcitx5 was already installed, but I couldn’t find a way to use it as virtual keyboard, and apparently it does not bundle a UI. i then installed maliit (the one that I use on my EndeavourOS 2in1 laptop flawlessly) but it seems to have a strange bug where it only works once, then after you close it it will never pop up again. I tried the workaround suggested here but it works once every 4 tries and the keyboard pops up but is unable to write anything.

Has anyone achieved to install a virtual keyboard on Kubuntu 24.04? I’d rather not switch to X11 because except for the keyboard, the touch support is way better under wayland

thanks in advance to anyone!

  • Björn Tantau
    6•30 days ago

    The keyboard situation on Wayland and especially KDE is abysmal. Through a workaround I managed to get Onboard working. But it often crashes for me when using it with touch.

    The keyboard from Steam actually works best for me. But I don’t know how to pull it up without a gamepad. I’ve got a post showing how to get it working outside of the Steam Deck. https://swg-empire.de/post/853437

    All in all I actually think that Gnome is better suited for touch devices. But I just don’t like how it works overall. But maybe your girlfriend likes it.

  • @ikiddEnglish
    2•30 days ago

    Afaik, Maalit is bundled with Plasma Wayland already. It’s there in Virtual Keyboards for me on Nobara, though I don’t have a touch device available to test it right now.

    That might be a problem with Kubuntu. It’s been a while since I tested Kubuntu, but the last time I tried it a few years ago, it was a trainwreck.