> The xf86-input-evdev driver is in maintenance mode at this point. The last commit was in May 2018 and, since the 2.10.0 release four years ago, there have been a total of 19 commits. It is still shipped in RHEL 8 in order to support "crazy devices" that don't work otherwise. Similarly, xf86-input-synaptics had a 1.9.0 release in 2016 and has had nine commits since. It is effectively dead and all touchpads should be working with libinput at this point. Since libinput took over from xf86-input-synaptics three years ago, no one has stepped up to say they want to continue maintaining it, Hutterer said.

Working software should keep working.

> In the old synaptics driver, we added options whenever something new came up and we tried to make those options generic. This was a big mistake. The driver now has over 70 configuration options resulting in a test matrix with a googolplex of combinations. In other words, it's completely untestable. To make a device work users often have to find the right combination of options from somewhere, write out a root-owned config file and then hope this works. Why do we still think this is acceptable? Even worse: some options are very specific to hardware but still spread in user forum examples like an STD during spring break.

From reading around, most of the distros started deprecating synaptics because it wasn't actively being worked on, didn't work with Wayland, required root for a bunch of stuff unnecessarily etc.