I am too lazy to RTFM and debug things, but does anyone know why libinput does not have the same behaviour as the old xorg synaptic driver ? I have a *30 thinkpad, and the synaptic driver is great, but libinput is terrible. It's too imprecise and jumpy. This is a fairly popular generation of thinkpads (the actual touchpad goes back even further). So I thought that it would eventually be fixed, but it looks like so far it hasn't. How does one make libinput act like synaptic ? I don't need gestures or anything fancy. I just want the pointer to work well, which the synaptic driver does an admirable job of handling. It's even better than windows.
I'd say it should just work or it's a bug. And I know it's tedious to file bugs and report required information but that's really the only way it's going to get fixed. You could start by asking on the list, just to see if this is a known problem that's already fixed in a later version.
For testing, you don't have to install if you don't want. I suggest installing the latest Fedora 30 beta test candidate. It's more reliable than Rawhide, and yet has the latest libinput so you won't be asked to build a newer version from git. Download the workstation live file, image to a USB stick, and do the testing from the live environment. Software installation is supported, it uses the RAM overlay.
While it's tedious to have to file such detailed bug reports, they make it pretty straightforward to figure out what is needed and how to get it. The devs have no way of guessing what the problem is. Plus, the fix eventually finds its way to all distributions, so people just get the fix rather than you having to maintain a local hack.
Filing detailed bug reports is still easier than fixing it myself.
I don't have the time or the skill to hack on most open source software, but I do file detailed bug reports, feature requests, and documentation updates whenever I run into an issue.
Thanks for all the information. It's one of those things that I'm aware of, but have just been procrastinating mainly because the synaptic driver is still packaged by all distros. Eventually, it may be deprecated. So I better get to it before that. I do test fedora betas/rawhides and ubuntu nightlies as well from time to time. I don't think this is fixed yet. Or maybe it's some hardware quirk and I'm hitting some other corner case.
