Here’s a script that toggles the keyboard on and off automatically:
I spent a while trying to get libinput to notify me about LIBINPUT_SWITCH_TABLET_MODE events, but I wasn’t able to get that to work. Not sure if libinput doesn’t expose that event externally or if I was just doing it wrong.
But KDE happens to have a DBus signal for tablet mode, so the script subscribes to that DBus signal and watches for changes. Then it uses DBus to toggle the keyboard on and off to match. Pretty simple and seems to work for me.
Unfortunately, the DBus objects I’m using are KDE-specific, so this won’t be helpful to people using Gnome or other desktop environments. Somebody on Gnome could try watching dbus-monitor for signals that fire while rotating the hinge. If there are Gnome equivalents then it might be possible to do something similar there.
Thank you so much, this works perfectly! One quick note for other users: I needed to install perl-Net-DBus on Fedora to get it to run properly, but after that and a reboot it’s working. I’m very glad I can stick with KDE now instead of needing to use gnome.
I found that kde_vkbd_toggle wasn’t starting properly after a reboot, because the service tried to start too early. I’ve adjusted the systemd unit file to start later, which should resolve this.
If you’ve experienced this issue you may want to update vkbd_toggle.service to the current version as described here.
I received my FW12 (lavender !) a few days ago and installed a fresh Debian 13 stable with KDE. Out of the box, KDE seemed to detect the keyboard flipping and going into tablet mode, but no screen rotation and no virtual keyboard.
I installed iio-sensor-proxy and it instantly started to work properly, no udev fix needed. I guess the fix has been backported to debian’s repos by now. (EDIT : it is actually backported to 3.7-3 in Debian stable : see changelog)
I installed maliit-keyboard and selected it as the virtual keyboard. Had to set it up to french bot otherwise works out of the box. Plasma does not seem to be very smart as to when the virtual keyboard is needed. It tends to linger a bit after the keyboard has been flipped back in place, and even when the laptop has been reconnected to a docking station. Not a big deal though.
Overall, everything seem to be ok, but the required packages to install might need to be mentionned somewhere on the quickstart guide. Or maybe both are installed by default with Ubuntu ? I know Debian is not an officially supported distro so tinkering a bit is expected.
This right here is exactly what I needed. I just got my partner a Framework 12 for Christmas after the charging dock on their iPad for the Apple Pencil broke, and I have it running CachyOS. They’re learning Krita on it right now after using Procreate on iPad, and the rotation is something that was critical to get working right for their workflow!