Comment 17 for bug 1686081

I experienced this problem when doing a *clean installation* of Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.3. I confirmed that the synaptics driver was in use. apt-get update; apt-get upgrade did not resolve the problem.

I was able to get the touchpad settings working by uninstalling the synaptics driver and installing libinput. I had to upgrade a held-back dependency in order to do this, and I'm not sure if the result was entirely kosher.

It seems like a clean installation should not have this problem, nor is it clear to me how the synaptics support got dropped in Ubuntu GNOME 16.04.3 when the upstream version affected was 3.20, and 16.04.3 is still documented as including GNOME 3.18. I can understand how these kinds of issues can occur in an upgrade to a new major version such as 17.10, but it's really a big boo-boo to have this sort of breakage in the routine updates to an LTS release. It would at least be helpful to mention this issue in the release notes for UG 16.04.3.