[looking for the gnome category] Caribou is the most usable of the OSKs available for GNOME version that I run. However, when I plug in an external keyboard and monitor, it is just obtrusive, taking up at least 25% of the screen area. Further, its “typeahead” function is useful when undocked, but often changes text I am typing to please its own internal algorithm.
Basically, would love to discover there’s a hotkey I can program to substitute for the clickable icon on the lower right of the OSK display, and hide the OSK, ideally for the entire time I’ve got the external USB keyboard / mouse plugged in, or the laptop’s built-in keyboard working (this is a “convertible” PC that flips to a tablet).
If you want to get rid of the on screen keyboard while using an external keyboard, why not stop the caribou service? Stopping will only remove it for the current session… it will still be enabled when you boot. If you want it again during the current session you can just start the service again.
I think using the init system to do it will be easier than looking for a hotkey solution.
It’s a bit maddening: Fedora, which has the best OSK available (IMO) also cannot seem to distinguish between mouse and touchscreen input, or tell whether the input should come from an OSK or physical kbd. The typeahead function is not fun visually, the OSK dances around to the point of being a distraction. Also, it doesn’t seem to be named Caribou any more; systemctl list-unit-files --type service -all doesn’t seem to show anything related to keyboard.
Logically, OSK should pop up whenever the touchscreen is touched in an input box/area, not when mouse or physical keyboard is used to enter that area. At least this is exactly how it works in OpenSUSE on the same (“convertible”) device; I’m just not a fan of OpenSUSE’s (KDE) OSK. So it may be GNOME vs KDE rather than Fedora vs OpenSUSE.
So in Fedora 42, for the time being, I have turned off “Screen Keyboard” in “Settings|Accessibility|Typing”. If anyone knows of a more elegant way please chime in. Seems like a major useability issue to me.
So caribou is not a daemon? That is strange. The only other possibility is a kernel module.
I would have expected that if you did ps ax | grep caribou it would find a background process.
I understand that Solus has some on screen keyboard ability. That might be worth a look.
I have determined that KDE with maliit is the best fit for me, and, since I “multi-boot” various Linuxes in my “lap lab” and most if not all have a KDE flavor or spin, I’ll just put this convertible in KDE “mode” (although Linux Mint is a definite exception, not worth the hassle of getting KDE running on Mint Xia or LMDE).
Mint with Cinnamon is a definite improvement over any Ubuntu derivative, flatpak is preferable to snaps, and I’ve come to distrust Kubuntu’s development cadence, as has Canonical! However, Cinnamon tends to be a bit behind the curve vis-a-vis touchscreen support, and other nicities of a modern er, tab-top? I’d really like to see one flavor that supports all these things, but I think I’ve found a happy medium for the moment on my 512-GB SSD, that I’m sure will bite the dust before I’m done playing with my lap lab.
Bottom line for me: even the most bloated Linux/BSD OS takes up 25% of the room Windows 10/11 “require” to do their magic, and I feel as secure with most distros moving to SELinux as defaults.