High Resolution Scroll Wheel Support Being Worked On For Wayland

The high resolution scrolling support in Linux 5.0 has been a headache to say the least. After being ejected from Linux 4.20 following early fall-out, the support was merged for Linux 5.0 but the user-space support has yet to stabilize.

Red Hat input expert Peter Hutterer who has been involved in this high-resolution scroll wheel support for the likes of Logitech and Microsoft mouse referred to the situation as "a bit of a struggle to say the least."

This support on the user-space side was delayed from the current libinput release and so the support in this input handling library won't premiere now for some months down the road. Peter has also been working on the Wayland protocol support for this high resolution scrolling, which in the end should yield more precise scrolling via the scroll wheels on these high-end mice.

This high resolution wheel scrolling support involves Wayland protocol work as well as to the common compositors like Weston, Mutter, KWin, and WLROOTS.

Those interested in all of the technical details can see this lengthy mailing list post by Hutterer outlining the intended changes for supporting this Linux desktop functionality.