External touchpad for Ubuntu?

[Liam Proven]

On Wed, 23 Dec 2020 at 09:44, P. Echols <p.echo926 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I had been running unity (I've grown accustomed to the interface}

Me too. I just upgraded my last 18.04 machine to 20.04 yesterday and I
still far prefer it.

>  Switching to Ubuntu, not Wayland, solves this particular problem.

You are mixing up 3 totally different things here.

[1] Wayland is a display server. It's the thing that lets Linux draw
graphics on the screen. There are 2 alternatives: Wayland or X, also
known as X.11 or X.org. Wayland is not a desktop.

[2]  There is no desktop called "Ubuntu". The entry on your login
screen merely refers to Ubuntu's customisation of GNOME.

[3] The desktops here are GNOME or Unity. That's it. Nothing else.
There's plain un-customised GNOME, Ubuntu-customised GNOME, or there's
Unity.

I have noticed that when you upgrade an older Ubuntu installation, the
login screen can get confused and show "Ubuntu" and "GNOME" as
separate items, but they lead to the same thing.

In this case there are really only 3 choices, but possibly with
duplicate entries:

• GNOME on X.11
• GNOME on Wayland
• Unity

I'm omitting numbers because I don't know what order they may be in on
your computer.

> I assume Unity is using Wayland?  Do you know if it is possible to use the unity desktop, but not wayland?

No. Wayland did not exist yet when Unity was written. Unity only runs on X.11.


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