Libinput Looks To Dominate On Both X11 & Wayland

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 4 February 2015 at 01:35 AM EST. 12 Comments
X.ORG
While libinput is most frequently talked about in the context of an input library handling the needs of Wayland compositors (and potentially Mir), it's set to also take on the roles of an input driver for the X.Org Server.

Hans de Goede presented this past weekend at FOSDEM 2015 about the libinput library being used as a generic input handling driver for the X.Org Server. The possibility of using libinput on X.Org Servers has been talked about for a while and is a planned feature of Fedora 22 to replace the various X.Org-specific device input drivers. This library has been working towards parity with the X input stack and making great progress in doing so, especially with the work being done by many of the same developers.

Hans de Goede's FOSDEM 2015 presentation about libinput basically shows that the library is coming along well, the xf86-input-libinput driver is maturing, and it will likely be widely used by Linux distributions as their default X.Org input driver. This driver also offers various features not widely available by existing X input drivers, as covered by the FOSDEM presentation.

Hans says that the plan is for X.Org Server 1.20 to likely integrate the libinput input driver into the server code-base, similar to the xf86-video-modesetting driver now also being part of the common code-base.

Hans de Goede's presentation can be viewed in full via these PDF slides for those that missed the presentation in person.
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