Dear all,

I'm using plasma5 under debian testing amd64 up-to-date running on an Asus Zenbook UX360U.

Unfortunately, it seems that some features are missing or disabled in plasma5, while gnome seems to provide mode of the touchscreen features out-of-the box.

How to get a good touchscreen integration in plasma5? For example:

• How to have multitouch support in plasma5? For instance, it is for instance not possible to scroll using two fingers, e.g. in okular konqueror or dolphin ? So far, they seems to only capture a single finger (this gesture draws a selection square). However, the touchscreen (including multitouch) is well recognized with programs provided by the qt5-examples:amd64 package and under some applications (e.g. firefox and chromium).
• How to enable virtual keyboard inside plasma5? Currently it is only displayed in sddm.
• How to detect tablet-mode in plasma5? for instance, if the keyboard is behind my screen, i'd like the physical keyboard to be disabled while the virtual keyboard should be enabled.

So far, it is not clear to me how to enable them (or even if they are supported):

• It seems there is no panel in system-settings related to touchscreen. There is only a pannel for the touchpad. Global gesture settings does not consider touchscreen;
• Some forums refers to the "workspace behavior" panel to switch to netbook mode, but this features has disappeared in plasma5; Switching to another workspace alternative (right click on the KDE button) does not improve the touchscreen integration.
• Note that I face the same issue with standard plasma or kwin-wayland : the behavior was so far the same, except that the wayland version is less stable.

I found some possible workarounds, but unfortunately, they to not solve my problem:

• touchégg seems to be what I looked, but it is not compliant with libinput;
• libinput-gesture (github) seems to detect swipe and pinch gestures, but I'm currently unable to bind two-fingure gestures with scrolling;
• Some forums talks about plasma-active, but it is not packaged under debian and seems related to smartphone and tablets.

Thank you by advance for your answers and your help!

I am not sure if this is the right place to get attention from the developers. I did post similar wish here https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=289&t=142916 with no response from developers. If someone finds better place to discuss ideas, please let me know. Unfortunately it looks like KDE is slowly dying. Sad, I like it so much.

I already withdraw my patience with KDevelop which I also liked, but some bugs made it unusable for daily development so I switched to VSCODE. With KDE Plasma it is still not so bad but once you get used to touch screen on laptop, you do not want to change and the lack of touch screen support for normal laptops may cause users leaving KDE after some time.

KDE isn't dying as development is alive and well. What seems to be dying is the forums - at least some of the subforums are underserved compared to others, and while there are a few of us responding to posts as we have time and ability to do so there are many posts which have gone unanswered.
Unfortunately, I believe most KDE developers don't bother with the forums (by policy?) and just focus on cases submitted to bugs.kde.org and phabricator.kde.org.
Your luck here is dependent on there being other users who are familiar enough with the components you're asking about and who have the availability to dig in and figure out how to make it work. (in this case I'm not such a user, sorry)

When I used dying I did not meant it offensive. I just stated what is obvious, the community of users is probably way too small. I still use KDE and still like it a lot. But the lack of support (and I tried a lot, including bug reporting, idea submissions and even attempt to bug fixing) is making it hard for new users to find quick solutions.

For example I feel I am almost the only one (ok one of two) on the world who is using KDE on laptop with touch screen!

I am experienced user (and recently learned a bit about KDE internals) and still did not find proper solution by myself and nobody responded. Of course you can enable qt virtual keyboard everywhere by setting proper environment variable, but this approach is annoying and not practical - the business requirement is "Explicitly show the virtual keyboard by .. [swiping screen edge/press panel icon/enable on HW button/whatever]".

The other side is when you look at Gnome or recently at Windows (https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/14/1746 ... ard-update) how they support laptops with touch screens you start feeling that KDE is lacking of something.

Dear all,

Thanks for your answers and your feedback.

The other side is when you look at Gnome or recently at Windows (https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/14/1746 ... ard-update) how they support laptops with touch screens you start feeling that KDE is lacking of something.

Yes definitely, but I hope that developers will implement these features in plasma.

My initial question was rather asked to be sure that I did not miss something and that indeed, plasma does not yet support virtualkeyboard nor scroll/swipe gestures (or discover how to enable/configure them). So the conclusion is : it is not yet supported, right ?

I have the feeling that almost everything is almost ready to correctly support touchscreen:

• Swipe, scroll, and multitouch is correctly handled by Qt examples and some apps like chromium or firefox under plasma
• Plasma gestures pannel seems to allow binding between some mouse gesture and some actions (e.g. scrolling)
• sddm already displays qtvirtualkeyboard

Best regards