F22 Switch From Evdev & Synaptics To Libinput

Written by Michael Larabel in Fedora on 23 February 2015 at 09:53 AM EST. 19 Comments
FEDORA
Those installing the latest development snapshot of Fedora 22 will now experience a difference in the default X.Org input driver.

Part of the Fedora 22 feature plan for a while has been to use libinput as the default X.Org input driver. Libinput was originally designed for Wayland-based compositors, but there's now the xf86-input-libinput driver that uses this input handling library from within a conventional X.Org world. Switching to libinput now ensures the same input experience across X11 and Wayland based environments, and in doing so for Fedora 22 will surely weed out a few libinput bugs and shortcomings prior to the big Wayland switch tentatively planned for Fedora 23.

Hans de Goede of Red Hat wrote this morning to the Fedora developers list that Libinput is now enabled as the default X.Org input driver for Fedora 22 workstation installations. This change is in place for the GNOME and KDE versions of Fedora Workstation and replace evdev and synaptics as the default input drivers. The Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop flavors of Fedora can switch to using libinput once their configuration utilities are adapted to support the libinput driver.


More details on this change can be found via this mailing list post and is coming just in time with the alpha freeze of Fedora 22 coming up on Tuesday.
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