Remove virtual keyboard/OSK ... again

[infoAt]

Apparently, the unwanted popping up of the virtual keyboard is a recurrent problem in Ubuntu without generic solution. Today, I suddenly had it too, on a desktop computer without anything like a touch screen. Yesterday evening, I received a load of updates and also installed the VLC player. So I cannot tell what caused it.

There is an option switch among the accessibility settings, but while this can enable the OSK, it cannot suppress it when it appears for causes only known to itself.

It has been suggested to remove caribou, onboard and ibus. The first two are not found installed by apt (Zorin 17.2) and the latter doesn't solve the issue.
There are extensions such as block-caribou that are version dependent and I have not found one that was accepted by gnome (and possibly they aren't maintained this far).

But this is the Zorin Forum, and in this case it was a Zorin issue that got me. It is easily remedied once you have found where to look, so hopefully it may help others:

• make sure gnome-extensions is installed (in a terminal: sudo apt install gnome-shell-extensions)
• open 'Extensions' from the activities/Zorin/start menu
• scroll down to 'Zorin Screen Keyboard Button' and switch it off.

good luck.

[poropa6576]

You can also easily disable it from the Interface tab in Zorin Appearance. Just click on the switch beside "Screen Keyboard Button in Panel" to turn it off.

Someone else on the forum mentioned that they added this option in a recent update and I only noticed it in Zorin Appearance after seeing that post. This screen keyboard button was disabled by default for me, so you might have accidentally turned it on previously.

[Ponce-De-Leon]

Do you mean this one:

New Zorin Feature: Zorin Gnome Extension Screen Keyboard Button

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen! Today I got an Update with Zorin Appearance and Extension Stuff: [Bildschirmfoto vom 2025-03-06 11-07-27] And I saw this new Zorin Extension. So, I installed the Stuff, made a Reboot and then take a Look at this. It creats a little Icon in the Taskbar where You can start the Screen Keyboard: [Bildschirmfoto vom 2025-03-06 11-11-47] And when You click on the Icon, You get this: [Bildschirmfoto vom 2025-03-06 11-10-17] Like You see on the Picture, You can acti…

This is new. In my Case it was disabled by default after the Installation. I had to enable it manually.

[infoAt]

The way you desribe it in the other thread, it would have been a nice addition. In my case, however, it popped up the keyboard, taking away half of my screen, whenever I had a cursor in any postion to write something. The situation was unworkable until I was able to remove that button.

Interestingly, I had a similar language issue not long ago, i.e. the input charater set switched to a non-latin language.