This is too great not to share. Wayland devs hate this trick! I’ll copy what I did from the bug report.
As a workaround you can use https://github.com/Supreeeme/extest to make Onboard work. Compile it as a 64 bit library and launch onboard with
env LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib64/libextest.so onboardIf you want to use it with KDE you can add
X-KDE-Wayland-VirtualKeyboard=trueto its desktop-file.
I used kwin rules to get rid of window decorations and have it always on top without stealing focus. If someone knows how to make all other windows smaller when it’s active that would be great.
Only problem remaining is that sometimes the keys get stuck on touch input. At least on my Steam Deck on OpenSUSE.
Edit: Just noticed that it doesn’t work on KDE’s lock screen. Hopefully I can find a workaround for that as well.
Edit 2: Was easier than I thought. Just select Maliit as a virtual keyboard and start Onboard manually. If you tap with your finger in a text field Maliit will come up. When you click in a text field Onboard will open. But Maliit also works on the lock screen.
how do i compile as 64bit
You got me excited there for a minute! Though I don’t really want workarounds (they are the only way and therefore a necessity / automatically good, but they are not the real thing), I want virtual keyboards with actual native Wayland support, please :(
Maliit has explicit wayland support and has a kcm
The problems with Maliit are that it lacks special keys like Ctrl, Alt, Tab, Esq, F1-F12, etc. And you cannot invoke it by yourself to type in XWayland applications or others which don’t pull up the keyboard by themselves.
The Gnome keyboard seems to be better in that regard but I couldn’t even find its name to pull it up outside of Gnome.
Cool. They didnt ask for a fully-featured keyboard, they asked for a wayland-compatible onscreen keyboard.
