My experience with Tumbleweed so far has been great on my Dell XPS 15. However, I found this very curious and somewhat severe, since it affects productivity:
(EDIT: for whatever reason the link to the reddit image doesn’t work, you can see it here:
EDIT 2: so linking to reddit doesn’t work and I can’t find where the “attach image” functionality is on this forum, so just trust me - the touchpad settings are greyed out)
I’ve searched reddit, read through some of the FAQs here, and attempted to search the forums - I saw some very old posts mentioning that KDE built around synaptics, but then I saw some newer ones that said now everything is built around libinput. Obtaining objective or stable information is a challenge.
So, how do I interactively manage my touchpad settings on TW?
You hint at using KDE, but you don’t say outright. You need to be clear on our desktop environment, because touchpad settings depend on that.
As for the image – maybe reddit blocks access to images except when referred from a reddit page.
Here, touchpad settings are grayed out because I don’t have a touchpad on this desktop computer. So I fired up my laptop. A few of the touchpad settings are grayed out, but most are available. The sensitivity setting is available. I’m not sure why that goes wrong for you. Perhaps it depends on the touchpad.
I do notice, however, that touchpad setting seem incomplete. There used to be a setting to disable the touchpad if a mouse is plugged in. I am not seeing that setting. However, that setting still works (I set it long ago, when it was still available). So I logged in as a different user. And as that different user, the setting is not available and does not work (no saved touchpad settings for that different user).
Welcome to openSUSE Forums. Yes, the libinput library provides the unified support for the majority of input devices and is being actively developed. (The synaptics and evdev Xorg drivers have been deprecated for quite a while now, although there are a handful of touchpad devices that may still require synaptics support.)
If you have ‘lbinput-tools’ installed, you can run the following command to gain useful information about your touchpad (and other input devices).
sudo libinput list-devices
You can post the output here for further advice.
Occasionally there will be touchpad devices that are only able to be handled as generic (eg ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse) pointing devices, so will appear as such within the desktop environment.
To provide some guidance around this: The https://paste.opensuse.org/ site can be used to host lengthy text output, and images (refer right-hand side of page where ‘image’ can be selected). An uploaded image can then be shared here using the URL it provides, and selecting ‘Insert Image’ in the forum editor. However, I’ve noticed that the URL lacks the file suffix, so I generally do that by right-clicking on the uploaded image and selecting ‘Copy Image Location’ (eg 'https://paste.opensuse.org/images/3370337.png) and using that in the image insertion tool…
[QUOTE=deano_ferrari;2921913]Welcome to openSUSE Forums. Yes, the libinput library provides the unified support for the majority of input devices and is being actively developed. (The synaptics and evdev Xorg drivers have been deprecated for quite a while now, although there are a handful of touchpad devices that may still require synaptics support.)
Thanks for the response. I came to the conclusion that because synaptics and libinput are both installed by default on TW, and because synaptics is later in the driver order (70-synaptics.conf) I would do better by simply uninstalling and locking synaptics.
However as I also found, libinput touchpad configuration is not good, so I installed m-track, put it at a later load position in xorg.conf.d, and everything seems to be happier.
It does raise the question- if synaptics is deprecated, why is it bundled with TW?
Yes synaptics will take precedence if present due to the configuration ordering as you described. It is still available for the corner cases already described, but it is still preferable to submit libinput bug reports for devices not properly handled by libinput. In any case, if Wayland is in use Xorg drivers become irrelevant, and the libinput library is used exclusively.
I couldn’t find how to start a thread, so I am responding.
Even though “disable touchpad while typing” is checkmarked, I find that the touchpad is not disabled for long enough. With Touchpad Blocker for Windows, you can choose how long after typing that the touchpad is disabled for, and I’d like to see something like that added to the setting in KDE. As it is now, with default settings, I find that the mouse cursor can jump around while I’m typing, which is super annoying. I also would like to ask that you include touchpad disabling by default, included when a person installs opensuse.
