Not OP, but when I tried Wayland way back when, I discovered that libinput didn't let you remap tap buttons, something Xorg does support. That feature is incredibly useful for me, since my touchpad has no physical buttons but does have a dedicated right-click zone, so it's useful to remap two-finger tap to middle-click, since I use that all the time for opening links in new tabs and pasting from the X buffer.
The libinput dev's response was a combination of incredulity that someone wouldn't have physical buttons (in like 2014) and a statement that the project would never add this feature. I haven't gone back to Wayland since.
That "dev" you're criticizing here has been developing libinput solo since the beginning. He asked for help numerous times and never received any. So either step up and do the work, or stop complaining.
libinput is yet another of those fundamental libraries that receive almost no developer attention, but get all the blame when something goes wrong: https://xkcd.com/2347/
He could also not have written libinput to begin with. libinput became the default because of political pressure from Red Hat and now we can’t complain if it’s worse than the project it is replacing?
There isn't any political pressure from Red Hat. They're often the only company that does any work on the input stack in userspace, without them it would probably not even exist or be stuck in a very old state. You can complain but it's unlikely to be of much use when the real issue is lack of manpower and there just aren't enough people to respond to all the complaints users have. A surefire way to solve that would be to start contributing, Red Hat won't stand in your way.
> libinput became the default because of political pressure from Red Hat
I don't know if this is true, but when comparing the KDE configuration screens for both, it sure seems like it must be true. libinput is missing much that synaptics has and doesn't seem to do anything better as far as I can tell. Unfortunately, just because a developer is working hard and pouring his heart and soul into something, doesn't mean the result is actually worthwhile.
It's not really true at all. The libinput developer blogged about why having more configuration options has historically not actually been good for the project, or for users of the synaptics driver:
Particularly, once you add a configuration option, you're now on the hook to support that option indefinitely as long as the project exists and users expect that option to be there. With more maintainers and testers, it may become feasible to have more configuration options, but it's still not a good idea to just keep piling them in. It might be satisfying to see a big configuration panel with a lot of settings but it's a lot less satisfying when you figure out a lot of the configuration options don't work correctly because the underlying system has bugs or is under-maintained or was just never tested with your specific configuration because input is hard and requires near constant testing against an extremely large number of hardware devices.
One-size-all doesn't fit me. synaptics gets the job done and libinput doesn't, it's really that simple as far as I'm concerned.
An example from elsewhere in this thread: "In libinput the edge scrolling is hard coded to 7mm" Somebody please tell this dude that the size of a human finger varies dramatically from person to person. Not everybody has his hands.
As for developer workload, the libinput developer could save himself a lot work by not starting his project in the first place. It doesn't seem to do anything better than synaptics so I don't see why it even exists.
I exclusively use the trackpoint for mouse input and configuring the edge scroll to occupy the entire touchpad meaning that I can use my thumb to scroll without moving my hand away from the trackpoint.
In libinput the edge scrolling is hard coded to 7mm and previous attempts at making it configurable were rejected.
Some HP laptops (EliteBook 8xx) have a track point but only have two physical buttons.
They're also quite large and flimsy, so I expect them to develop enough play that reliably pressing both at the same time becomes frustrating after a while.
The libinput dev's response was a combination of incredulity that someone wouldn't have physical buttons (in like 2014) and a statement that the project would never add this feature. I haven't gone back to Wayland since.