KDE setup on tablet converable laptop

Development
1

Long time KDE/Plasma user here (since 3 days). Recently I picked up a new laptop with a screen that folds over to make it tablet like. Plasma makes it pretty easy to configure the various modes, so I wanted to share my setup in case it was useful to anyone else.

Addons:

The laptop has a touch screen, which can fold around and the device can be operated like a tablet. Everything seems to work great under linux (aurora) except for the sensor which detects that the screen is flipped around. Thus, I wanted to add functionality to toggle tablet mode (kde’s tablet mode to widen spacing for finger use + disable keyboard and mouse). Additionally, I wanted to be able to toggle the touch screen as I don’t need it in touch screen mode most of the time.

The system I came up with is to use the Configurable Button widget in the panel along with a bash script.

Screenshot_20260606_154709

These are 3 configurable buttons. The first simply activates the overview mode

/usr/bin/qdbus-qt6 org.kde.kglobalaccel /component/kwin org.kde.kglobalaccel.Component.invokeShortcut “Overview”

This is useful in tablet mode, but I’ll come back to it later.

The next icon toggles between laptop and tablet mode by running the tablet script

/home/xian/.local/bin/tablet -d
or
/home/xian/.local/bin/tablet -a

Screenshot_20260606_154746

The configurable button is able to update icons when activated, and thus displays the status.

The last icon is again a configurable button, and it too toggles between the touch icon and a screen icon while running /home/xian/.local/bin/tablet -s

Screenshot_20260606_155917

As an extra bonus mode, I was also playing around with the kwin script touch screen virtual desktop manager. This configures kwin to launch new applications maximized on their own virtual desktops. Thus you can swap between apps by three finger left or right swiping between desktops, but I’ve also found just having a button for the overview mode (or 4 finger swipe up) is useful. This makes kde act a bit more like a tablet OS.

In summary, the configurable button widget along with KDE’s scriptablity is a really powerful and useful combination. Hopefully this helps others or sparks ideas.

2

FWIW the “change icons to be more touch friendly when screen is flipped” is a solved problem and works out of the box for many devices. I have an HP-Idon’tknowwhat (haven’t got it in front of my right now), which is admittedly a few years old, but it works fine.

It is good that you jerry-rigged a solution, but please report this as a bug to

[Edit: someone, because as, Nate indicates below, it is not a KDE bug, so it cannot be solved by KDE. Sorry!]

so devs can look into it and create a more universal solution.

3

FWIW, this won’t be a bug KDE can fix. Since it works fine for Paul (and it’s worked fine for me in the past) this indicates the issue is with the data coming from a sensor (or lack thereof), is a problem in libinput or the kernel drivers for that machine. So I’d recommend reporting it at Making sure you're not a bot! instead.