Secondary physical button doesn't work on clickpad using libinput

Question

I have just installed ElementaryOS on a brand new laptop (Dell Vostro 3568), and I can't get physical secondary button to work. When I set "Primary button" to left in touchpad settings, all physical clicks are left, and when I set it to right all physical clicks are right. I have tried all options for "Physical clicking" setting and they don't appear to change anything.

Tap-to-click (left) and tap-with-two-fingers-to-click (right) always work as expected, regardless of primary button setting. I'm coming from Ubuntu, and have never used Elementary, but I can get around Linux fairly well.

The touchpad on my laptop has entire surface clickable (i.e. it's a clickpad) and I'd like the lower right portion of it to act as a secondary click.

Answer 1

The trouble was in libinput, the input driver that comes installed with eOS to handle input events. It seems that it can't recognize clickpads (touchpads which have entire surface clickable) and differentiate between primary and secondary clicks. synaptics, an older driver handles this as expected.

But if you do uninstall libinput (xserver-xorg-input-libinput) and install synaptics instead (xserver-xorg-input-synaptics) you risk your keyboard breaking down, as mine did. Instead, install the synaptics driver alongside libinput. As far as I remember, there were some conflicts during installation, but aptitude was able to resolve them.

Next, in your /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-libinput.conf remove the section which mentions touchpad (this might not be necessary, but didn't harm). Copy the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and add the Option "ClickPad" "true" line to the section with identifier "touchpad catchall" (described here). Finally, save everything and reboot.