Bug#823286: xserver-xorg-input-libinput: Significant functional regressions for touchapds vs. xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
Source: xserver-xorg-input-libinput
Version: 0.18.0-1
Severity: normal
I'm filing this as "normal" severity, since I'm not sure how common my
installation setup is (how many people have mice vs. slick multitouch
touchpads), but personally this is "important" or higher -- I have
uninstalled this package because it removes basic capabilities from my
hardware.
The libinput driver seems to be replacing the synaptics driver, but it does
not match it in functionality:
* The pointer acceleration tracking is far worse than the synaptics driver.
I was able to trivially adjust the pointer speed settings for the
synaptics driver so that I can have fine grained pointer control and also
be able to quickly move the pointer from one side of the screen to the
other. After the libinput driver installed, I have no more control over
acceleration, and have had to turn down the pointer speed lest it fly all
over the screen, and so now it's hard to get the pointer across the screen
in a single swipe across my LARGE touchpad.
* Multi-finger click for secondary buttons is gone. Apparently the libinput
folks decided that this feature should be disabled unless your touchpad
says it comes from Apple. Because NOBODY ELSE ever wants this feature or
had it turned on before ... oh ... wait ... *sigh*. Granted, there is a
way to bring this back via mucking in dconf, but it disabled a common
feature for no apparent reason with no notice and provides no UI to get it
back.
* Inertial scrolling is gone, and there's no hidden setting for this.
Apparently the synaptics driver had a corner case issue where the
scrolling wouldn't stop when you started typing ... so they just deleted
the entire inertial scrolling feature and decided it was someone else's
job to implement it ... and nobody has. Who knows if they ever will?
To sum it up, this "upgrade" damages pointer motion, clicking, and
scrolling. Since we don't have the fancier multitouch gesture support out
of the box in Linux yet, that means 100% of the things I can do with my
touchpad got noticeably worse.
Until this input driver covers the core features of what it's replacing, it
doesn't seem right to have it be the default driver for these types of
devices.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'buildd-unstable'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386
Kernel: Linux 4.5.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
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