I’m not entirely sure what happened between the installation of the custom Rhino XFCE desktop (“Unicorn”) and when I posted that, but something decided to install the synaptics driver and it was not clear how to get rid of it.
I don’t really know that I would file this against libinput since I don’t really think it is at fault here. What I did end up doing was just move everything from Ubuntu 22.04 to the Rhino directory, then I removed the 10-amdgpu.conf and 10-radeon.conf as well since I’m using an embedded Intel GPU.
After restarting the display manager, this change solved the problem.
$ pwd; ls -l ; sudo ls -l ~backup~; ls -l /mnt/p9/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/; sudo diff . ~backup~/
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d
total 12
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1350 Jul 23 15:42 10-quirks.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1429 Jul 23 15:42 40-libinput.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3458 Jul 23 15:42 70-wacom.conf
d--------- 1 root root 260 Jul 23 17:20 '~backup~'
total 32
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 126 Jul 23 15:42 10-amdgpu.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1350 Apr 12 05:10 10-quirks.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 92 Jul 23 15:42 10-radeon.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1429 Mar 31 13:32 40-libinput.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 113 Apr 16 17:27 50-multitouch.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 590 Apr 18 13:56 51-synaptics-quirks.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1751 Apr 18 13:56 70-synaptics.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3458 Apr 8 12:22 70-wacom.conf
total 20
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 126 Apr 8 12:23 10-amdgpu.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1350 Apr 12 05:10 10-quirks.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 92 Apr 8 12:23 10-radeon.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1429 Mar 31 13:32 40-libinput.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3458 Apr 8 12:22 70-wacom.conf
Only in ~backup~/: 10-amdgpu.conf
Only in ~backup~/: 10-radeon.conf
Only in ~backup~/: 50-multitouch.conf
Only in ~backup~/: 51-synaptics-quirks.conf
Only in ~backup~/: 70-synaptics.conf
Only in .: ~backup~
The as-found non-working Rhino /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ was moved to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/~backup~.
The as-found was-working Ubuntu 22.04 (mounted at /mnt/p9) /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d was copied to the analogous Rhino dir and then, after inspection the previously mentioned 10- files were also removed since this laptop’s not seeing another GPU.
As you can see, there’s no difference in the remaining files (or the 10- files that were removed). I don’t know if I need the wacom driver or not for the touch screen, but thankfully that’s still working.
Anyway, long story short, this might be an option if someone else finds this, but I don’t see how libinput is at fault since all I had to do was remove the synaptics files. It would seem to me that whatever put/left the synaptics file there is what is at fault. I have no idea if that’s Rhino, XFCE, GNOME, or the FSM.