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This is what it looks like when SDDM (the display manager/login screen) looks like in Plucky:

image
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As you can in my comments on this bug, due to some recent changes that are trying to make life easier for tablets, the virtual keyboard now pops up by default. This will make things much easier for tablets, who have a terrible struggle to deal with when they don’t have the virtual keyboard.

For desktop users, the solution is simple: swipe it away. That little button that looks like a keyboard with a carat pointing downwards between the period and enter key is all you need to click to do so. In case that’s not clear, it’s this button:
image

If you want to permanently make it go away, add the following to /etc/sddm.conf:

[General]
InputMethod=

Luckily, this doesn’t change things for input in the rest of the system.

It’s possible this might change once we have a Wayland session, but we’re waiting on some core pieces (Mir) to get resolved in Debian before we can begin work on that.

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Is there no way to detect the idiom (tablet/desktop) before showing the virtual keyboard? It’s not a dealbreaker for Linux users like us, but I would respectfully argue that this is a big faux pas from an everyday PC user’s perspective (“it should just work”).

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Couldn’t agree more. Sadly, it’s just an on/off switch in the config file, at least for X.

This may add a little insight:

From that I wonder: can you make the InputMethod a comma separated list and just repeatedly clicking on the text field will cycle through them?

More testing needed on this. I’d welcome any definitive suggestions anyone has or observations they have made in testing.

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I tried playing with this and couldn’t get it to do anything but default behavior. So I think the comma separated list is out.

Also, repeatedly clicking on the text field did nothing.

But maybe the issue is I’m not on a touch device. I do have a touch capable laptop I haven’t been in front of in a while. I can try to play with that.

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On my laptop with touchscreen, I changed InputMethod= and tried to tap on the input field and the keyboard didn’t pop up.

I also tried a comma separated list (InputMethod=compose,qtvirtualkeyboard) and got nothing special. As I’ve said before, if you put anything in there other than the three known values, it’s as if you put in nothing.

So it looks like we just have to deal with clicking the button to make it go away.

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Thanks for all that effort.

My question now is: How would I login without a mouse to dismiss the virtual keyboard? I’m sure there’s some way, but Escape doesn’t work…

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There’s two things to do:

  1. Open up a virtual terminal, fix the configuration file, and restart SDDM.
  2. Just type the password with the keyboard. You should already be on your default user (as defined in the SDDM configuration, BTW), and the password field is already selected (that’s why you’re seeing qtvirtualkeyboard anyways; try tabbing forward or back and you’ll see the virtual keyboard goes away because it’s not on a text field), so you just need to put in the password and hit enter.

From what I can tell, qtvirtualkeyboard has no shortcuts for the actual physical keyboard itself.

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As I think about this some more, I kind of wonder about supporting tablets. Ultimately the question I have is this: does Ubuntu really support tablets? Outside of potential architecture issues (I have some old tablets with 32-bit ARMv7s which is a non-starter), I’m thinking there have to be differences between tablets in their boot ROM/first stage bootloader. In particular, I imagine that they’re not only proprietary but specific to each device or at least each vendor. I know I’ve seen people post about using tablets before on the old Lubuntu Discourse, but it’s not clear how they installed it. Anyone have any experience?

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That’s a great point. I’ve never heard of Ubuntu on a tablet.

Reddit thread, if you’re interested: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/s/yVUWI2xzLD

The amount of people who are benefited by that virtual keyboard, versus the amount of people who are annoyed by it, might not make it worth it to include in the first place.

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I decided to get rid of it (by configuration) in default-settings 25.04.8. I also explicitly set the theme, which will cause less problems for folks using sddm-conf.

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Just applied the updates for this and I much appreciate the absence of the virtual keyboard. Thanks for that work, and for the discussion.

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Ubuntu/Canonical tried to support phones and tablets at one point, but gave up commercially (my understanding)… and effectively turned the effort over to https://ubports.com/en/ which still has a link to the old ubuntu touch project … and if you follow the links you’ll find some of the tablets that were ported.

BTW, the volte hex has finally been broken - I will take the plunge when (or somewhat before) my current phone is finally deprecated (?)…

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Clicking once is fairly intuitive, although (no surprise) the initial presence of the virtual keyboard is perceptibly a bug (part of Kubuntu-specific https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/2107724, for example).

The need to click more than once, when the unwanted virtual keyboard reappears – after keying tab, for example (to reach the Password field) – is intensely weird.

https://i.imgur.com/pEqvdDj.png

I’ll attempt manual configuration.

Thanks

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I added the two lines to the file at a different path:

/usr/local/etc/sddm.conf

That seemed to have no effect, so I changed system settings for Login Screen (SDDM) to use Breeze (instead of maya).

HTH, YMMV (I have Kubuntu on Ubuntu 25.04).