Ubuntu on Xorg Ignores Tap-to-Click Setting

Never change a winning team - that does not work in the software world. You have to upgrade, you can't stand still on an ever-moving medium.

My recent problem with (the still very slowly booting) Ubuntu 22.04 (now on Xorg display-server) was that the "Tap to Click" setting in top-right system menu "Settings" - "Mouse & Touchpad" was simply ignored. I could deactivate it, but that had no effect, tapping was always ON.

This behavior is really annoying. When you type in an editor and accidentally touch the touchpad, the mouse jumps to the text position where the mouse currently is and continues writing there. It is very irritating when you suddenly don't see your current writings any more because they were inserted at the position where the mouse was left.

Fortunately, on the Internet you find tips. What I did to switch OFF "Tap to Click":

1. In a Terminal on command line, I took this file into a text editor:

       sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf
       

   In section

       Section "InputClass"
           Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
           MatchIsTouchpad "on"
           MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
           Driver "libinput"
       EndSection
       

   I added the lines

           Option "DisableWhileTyping" "True"
           Option "Tapping" "off"
       

   and saved that edit.


2. That was not enough. I had to remove the synaptics driver that seems to have been the cause of the problem:

       sudo apt remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
       

3. Then I restarted the computer
   (and prayed for still having mouse, touchpad and keyboard afterwards:-)

It is stunning that changing the display-server from Wayland back to Xorg causes such problems. I guess that is the price we have to pay for free open-source operating systems.