The touch situation is slightly frustrating

[ell1e]

KDE is amazing and I realize a lot of it is volunteer work. Therefore, please don’t take this as a complaint, but rather a hope that it’ll work better and an attempt to point out something that could be useful to address.

It seems like touch isn’t working well with KDE, with the severe impact issues I’ve ran into being:

• Tapping the manual on-screen keyboard toggle sometimes simply doesn’t seem t o work 499522 – "Input method" toggle doesn't bring up maliit osk, touch keyboard seems inaccessible meaning it’s not possible to type at all for some apps that don’t bring it up themselves.
• Lock screen may break with touch keyboard and leave user stranded: 489671 – Time-based lock screen with maliit enabled has broken password confirm button sometimes
• In many different KDE applications, a simple touch scroll will bring up the on-screen keyboard even after it was just toggled away, making it infeasible to fully see window contents using the entire screen when scrolling: 489822 – Possible underlying Qt or Plasma or ...? bug causing keyboard to come up from touch scroll

Less severe ones that might nevertheless probably be frequently encountered by touch exclusive users:

• Open/Save file dialogs appear to have no touch scroll: 496023 – Open/save dialog file listing has no touch scroll, making it seemingly near impossible to navigate larger folders
• Windows will shrink to make room for the touch keyboard but then when the keyboard is hidden to show more window contents, often the window won’t expand again even if maximized: 498221 – Resizable windows under Wayland aren't automatically shrunk to avoid having parts cut off like they are under X11
• The touch keyboard seems to lack a way to access some essential keys for power users, like CTRL, Escape, Tab, and arrow keys: Adding terminal layout? · Issue #20 · maliit/keyboard · GitHub

I hope this list is useful for somebody who might be looking into making touch work nicely with KDE. If not then I apologize for taking up anyone’s time.

[halfashark]

The touchscreen problems in conjunction with the honestly garbage OSK situation is really one of those things that’s become a huge point of contention in the various linux/tech communities when it comes to KDE.

https://www.mail-archive.com/kde-bugs-dist@kde.org/msg1030720.html

From an accessibility standpoint it’s a slap in the face and for the casual user its just very annoying that they keep introducing stuff and allowing the osk and touch input to deteriorate with every new update; especially when KDE repeatedly insists they’re doing all that they can but “it’s done by volunteers” but then turn around and post job postings for video editors that nobody asked for.

[ell1e]

I was hoping to avoid a too confrontational approach. This might be coincidence, but I even happen to use kdenlive.

[ngraham]

This is a good list.

The biggest issue is the virtual keyboard. Years ago we choose the 3rd-party Maliit keyboard, but it hasn’t worked out super well, and we’re currently in the process of developing a replacement: Plasma / Plasma Keyboard · GitLab.

Once we have a reliable virtual keyboard, it becomes feasible to develop the rest of the UI around it and fix relevant bugs. Most of the items on your list should be fairly feasible to fix. The hardest-looking one is the open/save dialog issues.

Making it possible to easily use and toggle without a touch device is important too, for improved testing opportunities.

[kde12]

I 100% agree with the list of @ell1e . I would like to add the following points also (not sure if there are issues for those yet):

• The Maliit keyboard doesn’t seem to come up with Electron-based applications (experienced with Fedora 41). At least sometimes it can manually be triggered by tapping on the on-screen keyboard button in the KDE panel.
• The width and horizontal position of the Maliit keyboard cannot be configured (at least the height can be configured by modifying a config file). This however makes it difficult on larger touch screens, as the buttons are spread out quite heavily.

Ultimately, a user experience like the one of “Unexpected Keyboard” on Android would be amazing. Special keys are reachable in an extremely efficient way by swiping to the top left/right of the keys. And also extremely helpful is the feature where you can swipe left/right on the space bar to move your cursor very accurately in text fields.

@ngraham : This is great news that there will be a new dedicated KDE touch keyboard
Is there any vague timeline estimation already?
Would some financial support for that feature help? Maybe if several users join in to sponsor it? I would be happy to contribute financially there. Not sure how much would be needed though…