Difference in settings between two computers running the same DE

Posting in #Newbie again as I’m unsure where to post this, and it’s kinda sorta a continuation of my old post about touchpads, although the desktop now too runs EndeavourOS, it has replaced Chakra.

The thing is, the only difference I can think of between the two machines, besides them being completely different hardware, is that they were installed using different ISOs: the laptop was installed using 2020.09.20, the desktop with the latest 2021.04.17. Both are fully up-to-date, both have the same versions of KDE/Qt stuffz:

KDE Plasma Version: 5.22.0
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.82.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2
Kernel Version: 5.12.9-arch1-1 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11

Now what has me completely stumped is the difference between the two, when I go to System Settings -> Input Devices -> Touchpad, best described with screenshots:

Laptop:
Laptop touchpad settings

Desktop (obviously greyed out, as it doesn’t have an actual touchpad):
Desktop touchpad settings


Now, I’d LOVE to have the desktop’s version on the laptop, so I can have it disable the touchpad automatically upon detecting my mouse being plugged in (and enabling automatically when the mouse is unplugged / switched off / no longer detected), but I’m also just dead curious as to where this difference comes from.

Is there a way to get the settings on the laptop like they are on the desktop (though obviously not greyed out, please) by way of installing a certain package I may be missing, or would I need to reinstall from the latest ISO?

Happy to provide logs, configs, all sorts of information, just not sure what would be needed.

I remember this too!

It’s probably LibInput vs Synaptics. Try pacman -Qs libinput and pacman -Qs synaptics on both. If they return different ones, then replicate the packages of the desktop onto the laptop and remove the laptop ones. If not… well I’ll be stumped :wink:

Same on both:

$ pacman -Qs libinput
local/libinput 1.18.0-1
    Input device management and event handling library
local/xf86-input-libinput 1.0.1-1 (xorg-drivers)
    Generic input driver for the X.Org server based on libinput

xf86-input-synaptics isn’t installed on either machine.

Now I can’t remove the libinput packages as they’re required by a lot of other things (qt5-base, xorg-server), but would there be a point in trying to install synaptics and see if that makes a difference?

edit

$ pacman -Qi libinput | grep -i required
Required By     : qt5-base  xf86-input-libinput
$ pacman -Qi xf86-input-libinput | grep -i required
Required By     : xorg-server

That did it, after removing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf file I’d created after being given that tip in the other thread.

Still don’t understand why it shows what it does on the desktop, where that still uses libinput, but at least my problem’s been solved!

Credits to @codic12 for pointing (pun totally intended) me in the right direction :beers:

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