There is no native touchpad multi-finger gesture solution on Plasma to enable people to pinch inward and outward to zoom in and out of visual elements of the zoomable interface, or to swipe multiple fingers at once to switch between workspaces, applications, etc. In the past, these solutions were generally libinput-gestures or touches, which served their purpose by monitoring touchpad activity and executing Xdotool commands. In the past, the solution has been libinput-gestures or touche, which monitor touchpad activity and execute Xdotool commands for their own purposes, and they work on Debian, Manjaro and Archlinux devices running Plasma 5.
However, on Archlinux and Manjaro devices running Plasma 6, they are not working. I configured them as usual, but they do not respond to gestures on the touchpad. After testing, I’ve confirmed that there is no problem with Xdotool. I would like to confirm if everyone here is also facing this situation, if this issue is related to an update to the Plasma desktop environment or Qt, and I would like to know how I should correctly configure the touchpad gestures on Arch-like devices running Plasma 6.
These tools don’t work on Wayland, which is the session type that Plasma switched to using by default for Plasma 6.0. If you want or need them to work, you can go back to the X11 session, which remains supported.
Note that while more old X11 tools will work, the overall experience should be expected to be rougher due to less attention and maintenance paid to it compared to the Wayland session, plus missing Wayland-only features.
Compare the “known significant issues” lists for Wayland and X11 to determine which one you can live with best for the moment:
Currently touchegg and libinput_gestures are not available on X11 after my tests, both on Manjaro installed by default and on Archlinux installed the normal way. The two software programs that listen to the touchpad do not respond regardless of which display protocol is used. These two programs are tools to monitor touchpad activity, they do not depend on X11, and the choice of X11 or Wayland has been tested by me on Debian 12, and they have been available on Wayland in the past for executing commands that do not depend on X11, such as via Ydotool, Dotool, or other commands, and they work. The point is not the display protocol.
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Someone else once said something similar. I think it’s very likely that the hardcoded gesture monitoring on Plasma is causing this.（https：／／bugs．kde．org/show_bug.cgi?id=402857#c11）
It does cause problems for some people.Someone once patched with Kwin to change a three-finger gesture to a two-finger one. But I don’t really know how to remove these functions, which doesn’t seem to be something that can be relied on as a simple fix, as it involves modifying a lot of functions, resolving unknown calls, and a lot more. And I am not equipped to deal with these C++.