z13-tablet-kit

Posture-aware tablet stack for the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 (GZ302, AMD Strix Halo) on KDE Plasma 6 / Wayland. It should run on any distro with Plasma 6 / Wayland and systemd (install docs use Arch / CachyOS).

Turns the Z13 into a proper 3-mode device: it detects whether you're docked, using the keyboard folio (laptop), or holding it as a tablet, and adapts the touchscreen, display, and auto-rotate accordingly — with no kernel hacks and only two udev rules needing root.

Stack

This kit is one of three cooperating repos. Install all three on the same machine:

Repo	Role
z13-tablet-kit	posture detection and touch input — this repo
z13ctl-plus	daemon that owns display state and persists tablet settings
z13gui-plus	optional GTK4 overlay drawer: live posture/health chip and tablet toggles

How they work together:

1. z13-tablet-switch detects dock/folio/tablet posture and applies it through dock (touchscreen toggle, virtual tablet-mode switch).
2. dock publishes posture to the z13ctl-plus daemon, which serializes scale and rotation changes via kscreen-doctor (tablet uses scale 1.75).
3. z13gui-plus shows the live posture/health chip and exposes the tablet toggles: desktop touch policy, two-finger context menus, folio touchpad opt-in, scroll speed.
4. z13ctl-plus persists those settings and projects them to $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/z13ctl-plus/tablet-settings.json; z13-tablet-switch and z13-touch-scroll read the projection and apply changes live, without restarts.

Ownership is one-directional: only the kit writes the posture file, only z13ctl-plus writes tablet settings, and the GUI is a read/write client of the daemon — no repo reaches into another's state directly.

Posture model

Posture	Detected by	Touch	Tablet mode	Auto-rotate	Virtual keyboard
desktop	dock hub 0b05:1ac1 (external monitor)	off	off	off	off
laptop	folio 0b05:1a30, no dock	on	off	off	off
tablet	neither	on	on	on	on

Priority: docked > folio > tablet. Attaching the folio never triggers tablet features. The virtual keyboard (plasma-keyboard / maliit) is gated on posture: it's forced off whenever a physical keyboard (folio or external) is present and only enabled in tablet mode, so it never pops up over a real keyboard.

Components

• dock (user) — applies posture changes supplied by z13-tablet-switch: it toggles the internal touchscreen (ELAN9008) through KWin D-Bus and publishes posture to z13ctl-plus. Failed applications are retried, and posture is republished every 30 seconds to recover cleanly from KWin or controller restarts.
• Auto-rotate — Plasma-native, gated on the virtual SW_TABLET_MODE switch below. iio-sensor-proxy (default on CachyOS) reads the accel; enable once via Quick Settings → Auto-rotate → right-click → "Rotate only in tablet mode". No separate rotation daemon is needed.
• z13ctl-plus display coordinator — owns scale and refresh changes. Desktop and laptop use scale 1.5; tablet posture uses scale 1.75. Plasma retains tablet rotation unless an explicit rotation intent is sent. This kit never invokes kscreen-doctor directly. Dock posture waits ten seconds for DRM topology to settle, and external outputs remain KDE-owned.
• z13-tablet-switch (user) — polls the dock hub, folio, and DRM connectors every two seconds, then calls dock when posture changes. A non-eDP external display counts as desktop, so any USB-C dock or HDMI cable works. It also creates a virtual SW_TABLET_MODE uinput switch flipped on only in tablet posture. The GZ302's WMI path advertises the switch but never emits it, so Plasma otherwise has nothing to gate "rotate only in tablet mode" on. Runs as a user service; logind grants /dev/uinput to the active session. The on-screen keyboard remains a separate Plasma setting that needs no tablet-mode signal. (Plasma 6.7 intentionally dropped the old "force bigger UI in tablet mode" behavior, bugs.kde.org #521550.)
• z13gui-plus (optional) — shows live posture and health when the kit is active and exposes desktop touch policy, two-finger context menus, guarded folio-touchpad opt-in, and 1–5 touch-scroll controls. Settings are persisted by z13ctl-plus and apply without restarts.
• z13-touch-scroll (user) — reads the ELAN9008 touchscreen and detects 2-finger vertical swipes, injecting mouse wheel events via evdev UInput. Works in any app: terminal scrollback, opencode TUI, browsers, and document viewers. It follows the desktop touch policy. An opt-in stationary two-finger hold moves the pointer to the touch point and right-clicks, providing a context menu where KDE Wayland has no touch right-click.
• On-screen keyboard — plasma-keyboard (ships with Plasma 6.7, recommended) or maliit-keyboard (AUR, legacy alternative); auto-pops on touch-focus. The kit gates it on posture — TouchOnly in tablet mode, forced Off whenever the folio or an external keyboard is attached (KWin would otherwise pop the OSK on any touch device). It also restarts the active keyboard on every posture change, because it caches output geometry and would otherwise render against a stale screen and clip keys after the panel/scale switch.
• Folio touchpad defaults to inhibited via udev because its firmware emits jumping-cursor events that libinput cannot filter. Members of users can explicitly opt in through z13gui-plus; every enable presents a warning.

Requirements

• KDE Plasma 6 / Wayland and systemd (kscreen-doctor, qdbus6, and gdbus).
• iio-sensor-proxy (default on CachyOS) — for Plasma auto-rotate.
• z13ctl-plus with its user socket and display coordinator commands available.
• Membership in users (configured by z13ctl-plus setup) for the guarded touchpad toggle.
• python-evdev (official repo) — for the uinput switch and touch scroll.
• plasma-keyboard (included with Plasma 6.7, recommended) for the OSK, or maliit-keyboard (AUR) as a legacy alternative.
• /dev/uinput write access for z13-tablet-switch and z13-touch-scroll is auto-granted by logind for the active graphical session — no group membership, no root daemon.
• Touchscreen read access is granted via a udev uaccess rule (logind auto-sets ACL).

Install

The kit is one of three repos in the stack. z13ctl-plus (the display/settings daemon) is a hard dependency — install it first. z13gui-plus is optional (a touch overlay for the same toggles).

1. Prerequisites

sudo pacman -S python-evdev iio-sensor-proxy

(pacman is the Arch / CachyOS package manager — use your distro's own for the same packages.)

iio-sensor-proxy is for Plasma auto-rotate; python-evdev powers the virtual tablet-mode switch and touch scroll. plasma-keyboard ships with Plasma 6.7 (recommended OSK); pick maliit-keyboard (AUR) only if you want the legacy one.

2. Install z13ctl-plus (required)

# AUR package
paru -S z13ctl-plus-bin

# …or from the release tarball:
wget https://github.com/aic0d3r/z13ctl-plus/releases/download/v2.1.0/z13ctl-plus_2.1.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz
tar xzf z13ctl-plus_2.1.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz
sudo install -Dm755 z13ctl-plus /usr/local/bin/z13ctl-plus
sudo z13ctl-plus setup

The AUR package (z13ctl-plus-bin) trails the GitHub releases (currently 1.3.1 vs. v2.1.0 — AUR updates are paused) and lacks the tablet integration. Prefer the release tarball from GitHub above.

Then enable its user daemon (after stopping any other Z13 hardware daemon):

systemctl --user enable --now z13ctl-plus.socket z13ctl-plus.service

3. Install the kit

git clone https://github.com/aic0d3r/z13-tablet-kit
cd z13-tablet-kit
./install.sh

install.sh is idempotent and safe to re-run. It installs the posture manager, touch scroll, their user services, and the udev rules, then starts everything.

4. Post-install (one-time)

• Log out and back in if prompted — your users group membership (set up by z13ctl-plus setup) only takes effect at login and is needed for the guarded folio-touchpad toggle.
• Enable auto-rotate once: Quick Settings → Auto-rotate → right-click → "Rotate only in tablet mode". The kit's virtual SW_TABLET_MODE gates it.

Verify

systemctl --user status z13-tablet-switch z13-touch-scroll
cat "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/z13-tablet-kit/posture"   # one of: desktop / laptop / tablet

Uninstall

cd z13-tablet-kit
./uninstall.sh

Uninstall returns to laptop defaults (scale 1.5, normal rotation, touchscreen on) and uninhibits the folio touchpad. The OSK package is left installed.

Logs: journalctl --user -u z13-tablet-switch.

Notes / optional tweaks

• Touch scrolling: 2-finger vertical swipe scrolls any focused app (terminal, browser, opencode TUI). z13gui-plus exposes sensitivity and speed levels 1–5; defaults 3 and 2 preserve the original behavior.
• Touch context menus: a stationary two-finger hold (~650 ms) moves the pointer to the touch point and sends a real right-click; moving either finger cancels into scrolling.
• Page Up/Down without dedicated keys: the Z13 folio keyboard has no Page Up/Down keycaps, but Fn+Up / Fn+Down are mapped at firmware level and work everywhere.
• 3-finger gestures are reserved by KWin (desktop overview / virtual desktop switching). Touch scroll deliberately uses 2 fingers to avoid conflict.
• Auto-rotate: driven by Plasma + iio-sensor-proxy, gated by the virtual tablet-mode switch. If a portrait direction comes out mirrored on another unit, that's a sensor-mount quirk to fix in iio-sensor-proxy, not this kit.
• Configure optional edge gestures in System Settings → Workspace → Touchscreen Gestures.