Hello, I have a question about touchpad settings, werent there like a LOT more settings for touchpads in the past (kubuntu 18.04)?
like you could have set it to support both 2 and 1 finger scrolling, or use the “ring-style” scrolling for basically infinite scrolling (albeit not horizontal) yet now it seems to be much more rudimentary.
Does anyone know why and if there will be stuff added back maybe?
seeing as I cannot edit the post I wanna add some clarification here.
touchpad settings before: System Settings/Touchpad - KDE UserBase Wiki
touchpad settings now:
Hi - although wasn’t using Plasma back at that time, I think what you’re referencing are features from the old Synaptics touchpad driver for Linux. Those drivers had been unmaintained for a while, and support for using a GUI to configure them was dropped from Plasma 6 to enable better support for configuring the maintained libinput drivers.
A couple links for reference:
I am not sure, especially as iirc my laptop uses an Elantech touchpad, dunno if synaptics drivers apply there.
maybe hopefully someday someone can add the stuff into the libinput driver then
I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=000e Version=0000
N: Name="ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=event7 mouse0
B: PROP=1
B: EV=b
B: KEY=e420 30000 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=661800011000003
That’s correct. Wayland compositors everywhere have standardized on using libinput, which provides significantly better default behaviors compared to the old X11 synaptics driver but does not provide quite as many options.
System Settings is exposing most of the available libinput options, with only two or three of them still missing at the moment. (Notably, we don’t have an editor for custom pointer acceleration profiles yet, and there’s no option for “trackpoint touch counts as mouse click”.) All the other feature requests need to be taken upstream to libinput itself, and KDE can add them once libinput provides the API.
Libinput provides some rather useful documentation about what it can and cannot do, for example, here’s the section on scrolling. If you have a feature that you’d really like to see, I suggest getting familiar with libinput’s existing feature set and opening a feature request on their issue tracker.
Libinput’s philosophy is something like, see if a problem can be solved for everyone without providing an option, only add an option if that isn’t possible. So when you present an argument, you want to think in terms of problems and possible solutions, and why the extra complexity of a new option is worth the (initial plus ongoing maintenance) effort.
If the developers decide to merge a new option, let us know so we make it usable within System Settings sooner!