Libinput 1.21 Released With Improvements To Flat Acceleration Profile For Touchpads

José Expósito continues with recently stepping up to manage libinput releases, the input handling library that for the modern Linux desktop is now widely used across both X.Org and Wayland environments. Libinput 1.21 debuted this weekend with various improvements over the prior release.

Some of the key improvements with libinput 1.21 include new APIs, a new configuration option that allows disabling the trackpoint while typing, improvements to the flat acceleration profile for touchpad usage, various quirks added for StarLabs laptops, and different bug fixes.

There is a quirk targeting the StarLike Mk IV as well as a quirk for all StarLabs trackpads. The quirk is needed since they are all based on the same design with a clickpad with physical buttons that act as one button. The quirk fixes right-click handling and dragging of windows.

The flat acceleration profile change for touchpads is now normalizing against the DPI rather than just copying the (non-normalizing) behavior used for the flat profile with mice. In turn this should keep the flat acceleration on low-resolution touchpads from dropping unusually slow speeds.

More details on the libinput 1.21 changes via the release announcement.