Tag Archives: touchscreen

Steam Deck and Wayland

BlaBlaSoftware

A while ago, Steam OS 3.8 was released. Among its many improvements, it includes a particularly important one for the Desktop Mode: it finally uses a Wayland session by default.

There are many reasons why this is important for both us and our users. It is more stable, more feature-rich, and does a better job showcasing what Plasma can do.

For now, though, I just want to highlight one neat little feature that is especially handy on a touchscreen device like the Steam Deck: touchscreen gestures.

Out of the box, a three-finger vertical swipe enters Overview mode, showing thumbnails of all open windows. This provides a much more touch-friendly way to multitask, and you can also close a window with a downward swipe gesture. Of course this is a feature available on any device with a touchscreen.

On screen keyboard

Software

In in an old screencast for Plasma Mobile, you seen a demonstration of an on-screen keyboard, it was a working proof of concept, but the interactin was still a bit wonky…

I love when those things happen: The autor of that plasmoid, Bjorn Ruberg (hats off) seen it and wanted to do something about… the result is a completely reworked widget, (that will be shipped with SC 4.5) now it’s faster, it has a way smaller memory footprint and more important is way more accurate now. typing on it has became quite fast.

In this little video it’s shown the keyboard widget working in an external little app that takes over a part of the screen (designed for small mobile devices) on the small Jax10 and on a larger old via-based tablet.


OGG version