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A few weeks of experimentation with libinput led me to believe that many of its advanced mouse-related features are not (yet?) implemented. Most importantly to me, you cannot block the mouse wheel with it, nor can you emulate the mouse wheel system-wide with the middle button. My question is twofold:

  1. Would it make sense to switch my Ubuntu from libinput to evdev? Am I going to lose anything important, either immediately or in the long run?
  2. If there are no apparent disadvantages to this course, how should I go about it? apt lists dozens of packages for both, some labeled hwe and some not. What should I remove and what should I install instead?
sigil
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    Worth noting though that evdev is a kernel interface, whilst libevdev is a userspace library that uses it (as well as libinput). In the long run you'll lose because libevdev is unmaintained, it was replaced by libinput. If there are any features you feel missing, it's better to implement in libinput. On a side note, I'd like to mention that libinput has a nice "quirks" subsystem. I've used it to disable left button on my gf's broken touchpad, maybe you could make use of it too. – Hi-Angel Oct 20 '19 at 20:09
  • I don't know how useful would it be, but libinput's maintainer recently has a couple of posts about scrolling that you might be interested in. – Hi-Angel Oct 23 '19 at 17:18
  • Thanks for the information. In the meantime, I tried to utilize the quirks system you mentioned but could not find a way to make it work. The /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks file seems to affect nothing. Moreover, the debug functionality libinput's help mentions is not implemented. Overall, I decided to postpone the plan to run Linux on bare metal and let Windows do the heavy lifting for a VM with Linux in it instead. Windows has mouse wheel emulation figured out since the beginning of the century at least. – sigil Oct 25 '19 at 12:29
  • Sorry, I'd try to figure out the actual code to disable a mouse wheel and such, but the only mouse I have has broken wheel, so I don't have much of an opportunity in terms of experimenting. – Hi-Angel Oct 25 '19 at 19:07
  • @Hi-Angel at least there's the issue of scrolling speed which is configurable in evdev but not in libinput. – rustyx May 23 '21 at 15:47

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