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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](https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/issues/316#note_183956) 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](http://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/10/libinput-and-button-scrolling-locks.html) 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](https://askubuntu.com/a/1278266/326207) which is configurable in `evdev` but not in `libinput`. – rustyx May 23 '21 at 15:47

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