In the past year or so I did a bit of a deep dive into on-screen keyboards (OSKs), also known as a virtual keyboard. I wrote up a document about things that OSK developers should think about when writing OSKs, that wayland definitely needs.

I have heard good things about the OSK that ships with GNOME, but alas Plasma only has Maliit – which I have found very lacking. Maliit seems primarily designed for phones or tablets, as the OSK is not running in a conventional window, but instead takes up half the screen! This is less than ideal for a desktop application, so I have been left in a bit of a lurch in terms of OSKs on Plasma. I did have a crack at attempting to contribute with my fork of Aleix Pol’s QVK here, but I lack experience with Qt’s virtual keyboard API and working with the more primitive aspects of QML.

Thankfully, [INVICTRA] on the KDE Forums has discovered a way to get the Onboard OSK working on wayland. In the interest of making this advice more accessible to people, I want to quote their instructions here:

I managed to get Onboard working on wayland. Kubuntu 25.04

#1 Edit the shortcut in the menu. Within the KDE Menu Editor look for the Environment variables field and add “GDK_BACKEND=x11”.

#2 Go to Onboard preferences page. Under Keyboard - >Advanced set: Input Options → Input event source: GTK Key-stroke Generation → Key-stroke generator: uinput

If you have time please try it. I would like to know if it works for others too.

I have found that it is working under my Arch Linux with Plasma 6.4.2. Hopefully this helps others!