xorg-x11-drv-synaptics to be removed from default install

Oct 20, 2016 22:40 GMT  ·  By

Today, October 20, 2016, Red Hat's Fedora Program Manager Jan Kurik informed the Fedora Linux community about an upcoming system-wide change proposal for the Fedora 26 release.

The new change proposal is about the retirement of the synaptics X11 driver, which is provided by the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package. It appears that, in order to offer users a better touchpad experience, Fedora Project's development team have decided to remove xorg-x11-drv-synaptics from the default install of the upcoming Fedora 26 Linux operating systems, due for release in June 2017.

"xorg-x11-drv-synaptics has been the main X.Org touchpad driver for over a decade," says Jan Kurik. "Some users prefer the synaptics driver over libinput. This requires the users to install the driver and then place a custom config snippet or, more commonly, symlink to the synaptics config snippets with a name that has a higher sort order than xorg-x11-drv-libinput."

Users who prefer to use synaptics over libinput can simply install it

Since Fedora 22 Linux, the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package was superseded by the xorg-x11-drv-libinput one, which some say offers a much better touchpad experience. However, many other users are still preferring the former over the latter, so the system-wide change proposed to land in Fedora 26 should make it easier to install xorg-x11-drv-synaptics.

If the change is approved for Fedora 26, the xorg-x11-drv-synaptics package will be automatically removed from your installation after the upgrade, but Fedora devs promise that it'll be a lot easier to get it back if needed. When installed, xorg-x11-drv-synaptics must be assigned as the preferred driver over xorg-x11-drv-libinput. Additional details can be found at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RetireSynapticsDriver.