Virtual Keyboard - Fedora 41

Help
1

Heya all. I got a friend who just switched to Fedora KDE from Windows 11.

But i got a question yesterday which i could not find a solution to.

He is used to bring up the virtual keyboard once in a while and use the mouse to select the keys. But i simply can’t get/find a way to enable it and been searching for a solution but non have worked so far.

The Maliit keyboard is installed and selected as default.

Is the a widget or something one can press to force the virtual keyboard to show? or an alternative

His system is brand new and is running fedora 41 kde with wayland.

2

Nope!

(:

And they show little to no interest in doing anything about that.

3

Darn and given i haven’t had any luck with the very few 3-party ones, then i guess its back to the drawing board

4

If you want maliit to show when using a mouse you need to enable KWIN_IM_SHOW_ALWAYS=1 in your enviroment variable.

See: KDE - ArchWiki

1 Like
6

Attempted it again. But i think ive mixed stuff up. The first attept did printenv say it was set to 1 but didn’t work.

This time i went directly into /etc/environment and it was empty and i set in the KWIN_IM_SHOW_ALWAYS=1 and it seemed to work on the VM. Will attempt it on his PC

1 Like
7

Got it working on his. He had an extra step due to using brave browser and had to force it to use wayland “Preferred Ozone platform” and enable “Wayland text-input-v3”

8

Thanks this helped greatly, I went almost crazy trying to bring up the one screen keyboard (virtual keyboard) in my new Fedora 42 KDE install, but nothing worked except setting this variable.
That said this still isn’t good enough, MS Windows 11 has two completely different virtual keyboards that you can bring up in a single click and close away with ease.
This KDE maliit keyboard only comes up randomly for me, and there isn’t enough a button to make it go away.
I use my PC mostly via my 4K OLED TV and when in MS Windows I would bring up the on screen keyboard via mouse or air-mouse to navigate/search for content on YouTube and it may sound odd but it’s actually very usesful and pracical.
The lack of virtual keyboard options in KDE (at least Fedora 42 KDE) is a complete deal breaker for me.
Using the Firefox/Brave web browser on a large TV via PC (for now only in MS Windows) to watch content has been something I have pushed for on forums and family/friends over 10 years, but without good and convenient access to virtual keyboards this won’t bring bigger audiences to Linux, IMO.
I am simply bewildered by the lack of virtual keyboard options on Fedora 42 KDE.

9

Its gotten to the point that I’m convinced they’re being malicious tbh and have something against either touch devices or accessiblity (or both).

1 Like
10

I don’t understand how a review of the work being done on these topics could lead to the conclusion that KDE developers are “malicious”, intentionally dismissive, etc. Please remember to be agreeable, even when you disagree.

This help thread was solved for the topic creator over a month ago. I’d suggest that if you have insights that can help move topic forward, contributing those in the right place, in a collaborative way, would be welcome.

11

No.

I’m sorry but no. Just to your entire statement.

KDE has repeatedly failed for literal years now to support incredibly basic and fundamental accessibility features that other DEs with way less in the way of resources have already at the very least implemented bandaid-tier solutions.

There is no longer an excuse at this point.