libinput 1.24 Brings Changes For Apple Touchpads, Drawing Tablets

Libinput 1.24 is available today for this input handling library used by Linux systems both legacy X11/X.Org desktops and especially by modern Wayland compositors for unifying input handling in the open-source world.

Red Hat's leading input expert Peter Hutterer announced the release of libinput 1.24 that brings a few improvements for users. For those running Linux on Apple laptops, natural scrolling is now enabled by default for Apple touchpads. Additionally, palm detection is disabled for Apple touchpads. Hutterer remarked, "the [Apple] touchpads are good enough that they don't need our help." The natural scrolling by default is a nice addition for those running Linux on Apple hardware without having to manually enable it now.

Libinput 1.24 also now always enables touch arbitration for built-in tablet devices rather than relying on a quirk for each of them. The pressure offset limit for worn-out devices is also now set at 50% of the range.

The other notable change is for scenarios where a relative input device's rotation is set to 180 degrees -- a trackball used upside down as an example -- libinput will now flip the scroll-wheel direction as well automatically.

Plus there are various maintenance fixes/tweaks and other changes as outlined in the release announcement for libinput 1.24.

Peter also released today xf86-input-libinput 1.4 as the X.Org DDX driver built around libinput. This updated DDX now have tablets with their Stylus3 button mapped to X Button 8 and tablets also now have a left-handed property available.