I have to send in my Deck for an RMA. As I had to reimage it anyways I decided to play around with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It took some small trial and error, but by booting into the Gnome live image I could enable the on screen keyboard in the accessibility settings and thus complete the install of Tumbleweed without any additional problems.
I was especially surprised to find that Gnome would turn the screen around correctly by itself. With KDE Plasma I had to set the correct screen orientation myself. And unfortunately Plasma also did not come with any on screen keyboard so it was effectively unusable.
But if you like Gnome you can put it onto your Deck without any additional hardware besides the SD card or USB stick. From a first look everything was working like it was supposed to.
I know what I will be doing as soon as I get my Deck back.
I wanted to try out Plasma on Wayland at least. And since I “knew” that sddm comes with a virtual keyboard I figured that would be an easy task. Well, it just had a button but no keyboard. But I hope this is an easy bug for OpenSUSE to squash.
My current plan for when I get my Deck back is to install Gnome and then use it to set up Plasma to my liking. Hopefully I can make some more bug reports on the way. And I really hope I can enable encryption without a passphrase and experiment around with virtual keyboards to get that properly to work.