Comment 8 for bug 1077277

The general idea isn't a bad one at all. If the keyboard sat somewhere outside the box it could do it's thing without causing side effects, like triggering grabs. We haven't looked into this direction yet, Onboard is for the most part just another desktop citizen.

Unless they already exist on the system, VMs or nested X servers may be overkill, but perhaps there are other ways to cut Onboard off of the rest of the desktop. I've been thinking to try temporarily detaching and re-attaching XInput devices on enter/leave events and have events from physical sources sent exclusively to Onboard. This doesn't seem to make sense on touch-screens anymore, though, no motion events.