Switching From Evdev/Synaptics Drivers To Libinput On X.Org

With Fedora 22 switching to libinput as its X.Org input driver and others beginning to look at utilizing xf86-input-libinput that uses a shared input library with Wayland, there's some details end-users and developers need to know about the migration.

Input expert Peter Hutterer at Red Hat who has done much of the modern work to the X.Org input code as well as to the libinput library has written about switching from the evdev and synaptics input drivers over to using the libinput input driver on X.Org (under Wayland, libinput is just used by most Wayland compositors).

Libinput is designed to work with any hardware and with this move there's minor changes to users wishing to customize their driver settings via the xorg.conf/xorg.conf.d. For now, there's also some functionality missing from libinput or not implemented in the same exact manner.

For developers there's important changes with regard to pointer acceleration, button mapping, touchpad disabling, and device properties.

Learn more about switching to libinput via Peter Hutterer's blog.