this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2025
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Rant: I hate the Gnome onscreen keyboard (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by Zak@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I mostly use KDE, but my experimentation and internet consensus point to Gnome being the most polished overall experience on a touchscreen. I'm mostly satisfied, except for the keyboard.

There's no number row. There's no second layer available by long-press. There's no setting to change either. There doesn't seem to be a great solution for using a third-party OSK like Onboard, especially on the lockscreen where convenient access to those special characters for those strong passwords we're surely all using might be of use.

The only option that works reliably seems to be a keyboard built as a Gnome extension. This falls pretty short of the feature set Onboard offers.

If I wanted minimalism to the point of hampering usability coupled with barriers to customizing my experience, I'd buy a fucking iPad... except those do have good thrid-party keyboard support. I don't understand what the Gnome team is thinking here.

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[–] TabbsTheBat@pawb.social 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's no setting to change either

If I wanted minimalism to the point of hampering usability coupled with barriers to customizing my experience

Glad to see you're getting the true GNOME experience :3. I used GNOME for ages, and honestly the only things that I like about it weren't even base GNOME things, they were the system76 extensions lol. Once I got more interested in customizing my system the GNOME base started showing itself tho, and it was honestly so bad that I have no clue how it got so big. Like changing the date format in the Gsettings, doesn't even change it in nautilus for example

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 8 points 2 months ago

I'm content without a lot of customization for this application when it gets things right. The tablet is a a tertiary device that doesn't really get used for productivity.

The OSK doesn't get things right. I shouldn't have to press layer switch keys six times to type ~/note2b. This is Linux. Linux users type things like that all the time.

[–] MXX53@programming.dev 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’ve been using gnome fedora on my surface. What drives me nuts is the keyboard resize when it starts putting suggested words above the keyboard. Makes typing a pain in the ass. I can live with everything else, I just want to turn off the word suggestions. I cannot find a setting to disable it.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I didn't know it can do word suggestions until I read this comment. A web search suggests this functionality is provided by the ibus-typing-booster package; you could uninstall it or look for settings related to it.

[–] MXX53@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago

I appreciate the lead. I struggled to find things that worked (admittedly didn’t look very hard). I’ll check it out tonight.

[–] MXX53@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

just for anyone curious, this does work, but it does seem to also remove some of the accuracy of the touch keyboard. Funny enough, the resizing jittery keyboard with suggestions is substantially more accurate and easier to type on than the stationary one. Grass is always greener I suppose. I reinstalled for now in hopes in the future I can have all of the features, without the keyboard resizing on its own.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 points 2 months ago

OSK situation on Linux sucks ass. Here's hoping that Plasma's new keyboard will be better.

[–] illusionist@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Which distro do you use? Those maintainers are the ones who decide what settings and apps are default in the final distro. It sounds like there is a keyboard and it's just not yet the GNOME default.

Just like ubunru chooses to use a task bar which is not default in vanilla GNOME.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

This is Arch, and I think its Gnome install is pretty vanilla. The OSK is definitely Gnome's default.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 points 2 months ago

The OSK in Gnome is built into Gnome. Which sucks both because it makes it hard to switch to something better and it makes it impossible to use it outside of Gnome.

[–] seralth@lemmy.world -1 points 2 months ago

If you don't like how something is on gnome then your wrong and should be ashamed. This is the gnome way

Move to something that respects you and respects that your computer is yours. Like literally any desktop that isn't gnome.

Fuck gnome. Seriously FUCK gnome. It's worse then apple.