Touchpad: Switching from Synaptic to libinput in Mate 16.04

[mike-g2]

I'm running Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on a Yoga 2 thinkpad. The touchpad performs poorly and I'd read that many of these problems can be solved by switching from using synaptic to libinput. I've installed libinput, but synaptic is still being used. I've tried changing the number of the .conf files in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d so that libinput has a lower number than synaptic, but that didn't have any effect. Can someone clue me in to

a) Whether or not libinput is supported in UbuntuMate
b) How to implement it if so.

[mc4man]

a. - no clue
b. - remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package, if installed it will be used.

[mike-g2]

Unfortunately removal does not seem to be an options

$ sudo dpkg -r xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
dpkg: dependency problems prevent removal of xserver-xorg-input-synaptics:
xserver-xorg-input-all depends on xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.

dpkg: error processing package xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (--remove):
dependency problems - not removing
Errors were encountered while processing:
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Of course, now that I've tried to remove synaptics its behavior has gotten worse.

[mike-g2]

Update: So feeling reckless I tried,

sudo dpkg -r --force-depends xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

and then rebooted.

Nothing seems to be broken and the touchpad seems to work.

Yippie

[mc4man]

Yeah, I typically use synaptic package manager which would happily remove both.
The xserver-xorg-input-all package is a meta package, i.e. it only has dependencies (4) & doesn't actually provide anything so it's quite safe to remove.

[mike-g2]

Update: My solution was only a partial solution because when I go to install a package using apt the program wants to reinstall the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package.

My workaround was to (a) replace the input-synaptics package with a custom created dummy package with the same name by following the instructions from http://askubuntu.com/a/626912 and then lock this package to its current release in the synaptic package manager.

I'm not convinced this is a complete solution because now my caps_lock has reverted from acting as a ctl key to caps_lock again. Sigh.