In an attempt to improve the touchscreen experience

Mar 10, 2017 00:29 GMT  ·  By

KDE developer Martin Gräßlin published an interesting article on his personal blog to inform the Linux and KDE community about some of the exciting new features coming to the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment later this spring.

The development of KDE Plasma 5.10 is ongoing, and it looks like a Beta release is scheduled for the beginning of the second week of May, on the 11th, when early adopters will be able to get a taste of its upcoming features, including the Folder View mode, which we detailed a couple of weeks ago right here on Softpedia Linux.

In a continued effort to improve the overall experience for touchscreen users, the KDE developer is pleased to announce that a virtual keyboard will be implemented on the lock screen in KDE Plasma 5.10 for X11, making it easier for tablet or 2-in-1 users to log in to the desktop environment without needing to connect a physical keyboard.

"Plasma 5.10 finally integrates qtvirtualkeyboard directly in the lockscreen component of the look and feel package," reveals Martin Gräßlin. "Support for Qt’s virtual keyboard is not new in Plasma in general, it is already fully integrated into the Plasma Wayland session. This change, though, can be used on both Wayland and X11."

Already available for Wayland users

If you're using the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment on the Wayland display server, you can already use the virtual keyboard, but the KDE Plasma 5.10 update will improve the out-of-the-box experience for touch screens by adding a new button next to the switcher that lets you change the keyboard layout (see the screenshot gallery for details).

Support for East Asian languages was also added to the virtual keyboard, and it looks like you can use the on-screen keyboard for any other KDE application if you specify the "QT_IM_MODULE=qtvirtualkeyboard" environment variable on your X11 session. KDE Plasma 5.10 is slated for release on May 30, 2017.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

KDE Plasma 5.10 lock screen
Virtual keyboard on lock screen
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