When you're using a laptop and you left-click on the touchpad applet, the touchpad becomes disabled, and you have no means to re-enable it using the touchpad. Since it has no keyboard shortcut by default either, then your laptop has just become unusable. At this point, one of two things will happen: 1. If you have an external mouse handy, you have to go get one, plug it in, and click on the applet again to re-enable it. This is an annoyance. 2. If you don't have an external mouse handy--say you're on a train or a plane or at a conference--then your laptop has become catastrophically unusable and you will reconsider ever using KDE software again. Left-click-to-toggle-touchpad is far too dangerous a default setting for this applet. Consider switching to middle-click, or removing the functionality entirely.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/455
Git commit 3b4026641454c02ad3030c8cd2134a672995ffa9 by Nate Graham. Committed on 18/05/2021 at 18:15. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. Delete the Touchpad applet Ths only thing this applet can do is disable or re-enable your touchpad. If you have no touchpad, it is pointless. If you have only a touchpad and no mouse, then the only thing it can do is give you a way to brick your laptop until you find a mouse you can use to re-enable the touchpad. The only conceivable non-catastrophic usage of this applet is to manually disable a laptop's touchpad when a mouse is plugged in. This is an extremely niche use case that can already be accomplished by using the "Toggle Touchpad" keyboard shortcut which is exported by the KCM, and would be better served by a setting in the touchpad KCM itself to automatically disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in and re-enable it when unplugged, should such a feature be deemed useful. I have my doubts, as Libinput has gotten very good at ignoring false input these days, so I think there is no longer much of a use case for disabling a touchpad at all. Overall, this applet is not worth the bugs and degradation of the user experience that it can cause. It is too dangerous to exist. Let's delete it. Related: bug 434720, bug 397210, bug 378879, bug 430029, bug 434717 FIXED-IN: 5.23 M +1 -1 kcms/touchpad/CMakeLists.txt D +0 -155 kcms/touchpad/applet/qml/contents/ui/touchpad.qml D +0 -160 kcms/touchpad/applet/qml/metadata.desktop D +0 -30 kcms/touchpad/applet/touchpad.svg R +4 -12 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/CMakeLists.txt [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/CMakeLists.txt - 065% similarity] R +0 -0 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/plasma-dataengine-touchpad.desktop [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/plasma-dataengine-touchpad.desktop - 100% similarity] R +0 -0 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/touchpad.operations [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/touchpad.operations - 100% similarity] R +0 -0 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/touchpadengine.cpp [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/touchpadengine.cpp - 100% similarity] R +0 -0 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/touchpadengine.h [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/touchpadengine.h - 100% similarity] R +0 -0 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/touchpadservice.cpp [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/touchpadservice.cpp - 100% similarity] R +0 -0 kcms/touchpad/dataengine/touchpadservice.h [from: kcms/touchpad/applet/touchpadservice.h - 100% similarity] https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/commit/3b4026641454c02ad3030c8cd2134a672995ffa9
I really need this applet back. Is it getting uploaded somewhere? Is there an alternate implementation? I have a laptop with a touch screen and a very overly sensitive touchpad. I can barely type with the touch pad enabled. I had the applet set to enable/disable the touchpad with cntrl-alt-t and I could toggle it with the System tray icon. The system tray icon also gave me the feedback to see if the touchpad was enabled/disabled. It was easy enough to go into the system tray config and enable/disable the entry if someone didn't want it, so I don't understand why this was removed instead of just making the default "always hidden" or "shown when relevant" like some of the others.