Description of problem: The synaptics touchpad driver, as configured out of the box, provides a terrible user experience on many laptops. Google created a very powerful and modern touchpad driver with gesture recognition support for ChromeOS, and this driver ("CMT") has been open sourced. It would be nice to include CMT in Fedora. I understand it works with a range of different hardware devices. https://github.com/hugegreenbug/xf86-input-cmt More detail: issues with the synaptics driver (including on the Dell XPS 15 Touch and other Dell models) include the following: (1) The cursor moves before a physical click event if you try clicking the mouse pad buttons with the side of your thumb (because as your thumb goes down, the touch point "blob" gets significantly elongated in one direction, causing the centroid to move and frequently moving the mouse cursor out of the target region before the click event is generated). This can make the touchpad almost unusable, because you can't click on anything you want to click on unless you gingerly press with the center of your fingertip. ("Tap to click" doesn't seem to work out of the box on the XPS 15 Touch, you have to physically click or set up an Xorg config file to get tap to click working. Either way though, some users will want to physically click the bottom left of the touch pad out of habit.) (2) when dragging the mouse cursor with your index finger, if your thumb lightly touches the bottom of the touchpad (either intentionally, pre-click, or unintentionally), the mouse cursor frequently jumps from its current position to the very bottom of the screen. This may be because the "touch down" threshold for X and Y are actually different, leading the touchpad to treat the two touch points as one "blob" (because the touch threshold hasn't been reached in both X and Y simultaneously), so the centroid jumps to the midpoint between the touchpoints. (3) it can be easy to accidentally move the mouse pointer when your palm brushes the touchpad. (4) The movement is not always smooth and does not always track your finger well. CMT solves all the above problems. The touchpad feels like a totally different device. How reproducible: 100%
xf86-input-cmt isn't packaged in fedora and neither is libgestures. That would be the first step to even ship them, let alone replacing them by default. You can see the process of getting new packages into fedora here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Join_the_package_collection_maintainers Note also that we are currently working on a replacement called libinput that will replace the synaptics driver in the long term. And, thanks to your bug, we're now looking into possibly using libgestures in libinput. I'm closing this bug as DEFERRED for now though - until the two packages are in Fedora we won't be replacing it.
I'm glad I drew your attention to libgestures, it looks like a pretty powerful and useful library. I may actually consider taking on the packaging of CMT. However, before I do so, what is the roadmap and approximate timeline for libinput? I believe libinput is an important part of the Wayland ecosystem? If CMT would be made obsolete by libinput in one or two Fedora releases, I may not go to the effort to package CMT, get it accepted for inclusion, keep it up to date etc.
libinput's timeframe is roughly to replace the synaptics driver by F22