I was a happy Kubuntu 18.04 user for several years, until recently - installed Kubuntu 22.
Was very surprised the touchpad settings became very limited and “momentum” scrolling disappeared.
It took me few hours of googling to find out that I need to install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics to have the touchpad settings back. It seems I did the same googling long ago, after installation of 18.04 and just forgot about it.
I’m curious, what is the rationale behind supplying the library with limited functionality by default, so that user need to replace it manually? From user perspective that makes little sense. Shouldn’t the more capable input library be shipped by default?
The old Synaptics input drivers that you were accustomed to are abandoned upstream. No more bugfixes, no more new features, nothing. They’re also not compatible with the Wayland session. For those reasons, every Linux distro has since moved to the newer, actively developed Libinput drivers.
FWIW the new one does have some features that the old one lacks, such as thumb and palm rejection that actually works, which is a big deal with modern giant buttonless touchpads.
I’m still not convinced. I’ve never experienced any bugs with touchpad in Kubunu 18 using synaptics driver and I don’t anticipate any in Kubuntu 22. So it might be abandoned, but its also stable and works well.
From user perspective the default input configuration lacks an important usability feature. The scrolling “momentum” is so useful, can’t imagine living w/o it. I believe many other users have the same opinion.
I understand, that this is open-source (released a lot of open-sourced software myself) and from developer perspective things might look different. But isn’t the goal of the developer to solve the real world (=user’s) needs and problems?
Anyway, just pointing on the pretty bad usability defect (which can be easily fixed by switching to different input library).
I’m not sure there’s anything to convince you of. This is simply the answer to the question of why the older synaptics input driver is no longer shipped by default in any Linux distro. Again, this is not a KDE decision, it’s a distro decision, and one they pretty much had to make since the Synaptics driver is unmaintained and has no support for Wayland, which everyone is currently moving to.
This is simply the answer to the question of why the older synaptics input driver is no longer shipped by default in any Linux distro. Again, this is not a KDE decision, it’s a distro decision, and one they pretty much had to make since the Synaptics driver is unmaintained and has no support for Wayland, which everyone is currently moving to.