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I was looking into turning on drag lock so I could briefly lift my finger and reposition it to continue a tap-and-drag.

# get touchpad device id (12 in my case)
xinput --list
# get touchpad props
xinput list-props 12
# set libinput "Tapping Drag Lock Enabled"
xinput set-prop 12 280 1

This worked, though I figured I'd need to find a way to automate it, as I assumed the setting would be lost next time I restarted the machine. To test that hypothesis, I shut down and rebooted.

After the reboot, xinput list-props 12 shows Synaptics properties rather than libinput, as if the touchpad has changed its mind about which driver to use. For example, the drag-lock feature is listed as:

Synaptics Locked Drags (287):   0

Also, attempting to switch the touchpad to "natural scrolling" has no effect. Clarification I just realized that the gui isn't even showing an interface to set "natural scrolling" for the touchpad, only for the mouse.

How can I determine which driver is being used, and what might be changing that?

For reference, I'm running Gnome3 on Ubuntu 17.04

ivan
  • 407

1 Answers1

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I'm not sure what caused the change in gnome's driver choice, but I was able to fix the problem by removing synaptics and its config files (after making sure libinput was still installed).

# ensure libiniput drivers are installed
dpkg --status libinput-bin libinput10 xserver-xorg-input-libinput \
  | grep --before-context=1 '^Status: '

# remove synaptics drivers & config files so gnome doesn't get confused
sudo apt-get purge xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
ivan
  • 407