I usually just start an onscreen keyboard but I look forward to smarter folks telling me the way...
I think Wayland Qt apps start the keyboard automatically when I focus a text box. It works in Firefox, for example. Doesn't seem to be the case for Xwayland apps and I haven't tested Gtk.
On my Thinkpad 2in1, the behavior your desire is what I get. I'm on Fedora KDE (Kinoite) which pre-installs Maliit by default though, I'm not sure if it comes with some additional configuration.
The help page of virtual keyboards mentions detecting a hardware keyboard, but that's all I know. Does it not detect the keyboard built into my laptop? It makes no sense to me lol.
How do you start that? Is it a seperate package? I never even saw it but really curious
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