I’m running tumbleweed with KDE 5.15.3 on a relatively new HP laptop and had been having scrolling problems with my touchpad in LibreOffice–scrolling was so fast that it made LibreOffice almost unusable. Out of curiosity I tried logging in with wayland yesterday and now scrolling works normally! So I thought I"d post this in case anyone else might be having similar problems. In general the touchpad seems to work better in wayland–three-finger taps, for example, are recognized more easily. (My laptop has an Alps touchpad.)
Perhaps try removing “x86-input-synaptics”. If that helps, then taboo it. Otherwise you can reinstall.
My understanding is that Xorg use “x86-input-synaptics” if it is installed, but Wayland doesn’t. So possibly that’s the difference you are seeing. At least it is worth testing.
I have removed “x86-input-synaptics” on my laptop, and everything still works. However, I can’t say much about that, because the only thing that I want to work with a touchpad, is the ability to completely disable it.
Just to clarify - Xorg drivers are irrelevant in a Wayland context (and onliy libinput is used for input devices). With an Xorg-server in use, input devices are generally handled by libinput by way of an Xorg wrapper (xf86-input-libinput package). However, as Neil mentions ‘x86-input-synaptics’ can take precedence (depends on config file numbering for ordering) if present, but I wouldn’t expect it to be present unless deliberately installed by the user.
My understanding is that Xorg use “x86-input-synaptics” if it is installed, but Wayland doesn’t. So possibly that’s the difference you are seeing. At least it is worth testing.
I don’t remember installing x86-input-synaptics but sure enough it was installed. And when I removed it scrolling did improve in Xorg. But the overall touchpad performance still seems better when using Wayland.
Good to know that it was impacting here. BTW, you can examine the currently used input drivers (in an X-server environment) using something like
grep "Using input" /var/log/Xorg.0.log
The synaptics driver is largely deprecated now and users experiencing problems with libinput device handling behaviour should submit a bug report to get it addressed.
Thanks for the info, Deano.