Add support for unified Xorg input driver

[Timo Aaltonen]

xserver-xorg-input-libinput driver will eventually replace current input drivers (evdev, synaptics at first, wacom later). This needs changes to the desktop configuration tools.

background info:
http://www.x.org/wiki/Events/XDC2014/XDC2014HuttererLibInput/xdc-2014.html
https://fosdem.org/2015/schedule/event/libinput/attachments/slides/591/export/events/attachments/libinput/slides/591/libinput_xorg.pdf

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

GNOME 3.16 should be libinput-ready, so gnome-control-center 3.16 will fix this AIUI

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

kcm-touchpad support discussed here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1184713

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

how much difference does it make for users/maintainance? asked differently, is that something that would be a nice to have, or something that would be a real win and that we should look at for the coming lts?

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

It should be much better for touchpads, and the plan would be to replace evdev/synaptics drivers, maybe wacom too, in wily+1. X would then share the same input bits (libinput) with Mir & Wayland.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

testing is really easy; just install xserver-xorg-input-libinput and re-login, you're using the driver then since the xorg.conf.d snippet is loaded last, so effectively overrides evdev and synaptics ones.

[Rohan Garg (rohangarg)]

Seems to work just fine on my Macbook Pro 8,2 . KCM Touchpad seems to load but only a few options seem to work ( like scrolling ).

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

We had a discussion between Laney, Seb, Timo in #ubuntu-desktop. We can not be sure what effect this change will have on everyone, so we are not targeting for X because LTS. Instead this will (hopefully) happen early in the Y cycle.

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

Installing xserver-xorg-input-libinput is necessary to get Touchpad options to show in gnome-control-center 3.20.

Because of this:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=759595

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/commit/?id=66c211ff24be

Mentioning here because I assume we'd want to switch to libinput before doing that package upgrade or instead maybe we could just revert that change temporarily.

[Jeremy Bicha (jbicha)]

Never mind. Unity obviously uses unity-settings-daemon these days.

I believe Ubuntu GNOME will want to hard depend on libinput for yakkety so it would be good if unity-control-center could handle libinput too so that Touchpad Settings work well for those who use both GNOME and Unity.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

I guess it's fine for gnome/kde to depend on xserver-xorg-input-libinput until unity has gained support for it, at which point the driver will get pulled in by xserver-xorg-input-all

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

turns out KDE has supported this since over a year ago

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

yakkety has g-c-c 3.20

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

status on cinnamon

https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-settings-daemon/issues/78

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

status on mate

https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-control-center/issues/133

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

Hi,

I've decided to make separate issue about mate-settings-daemon:
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-settings-daemon/issues/160

Currently I'm working on backporting various stuff from gnome-settings-daemon to make it possible to apply libinput support from cinnamon-settings-daemon.

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

Ok, it's done in MATE 1.18.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Pretty sure this is a wontfix for Unity by now.