Touchpad tap stopped working

Touchpad tap stopped working on Ubuntu 16.04 I installed genome 3.2 and then removed it, and convert back to unity. Two finger scrolling is working. I don't see touchpad settings in settings. I've tried this solution:

synclient TapButton1=1 TapButton2=3 TapButton3=2

But it says that synaptics driver is not loaded

Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?

How to get touchpad taps working again?

It looks like you installed libinput. You have two options:

1. Enable tapping with libinput. It can be done by adding

   Option "Tapping" "true"
   

to the touchpad section of /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-libinput.conf.

Tapping in libinput is disabled by defualt.

2. Remove libinput. That will revert to xorg-synaptics user space driver. It can be done by

   sudo apt remove xserver-xorg-input-libinput
   

libinput is a new user space driver that will replace xorg-synaptics in new distro versions. I do not recommend to remove it.

I had the same problem and after a LOT of searching and trial and error I came up with this solution and I am sure It will work in your case as well. Since you tried installing gnome3 and then later un-installed it,it would have changed some settings particularly libinput. Try to remove it and I am sure your touchpad tap will start working again. I ran-

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-input-libinput

or

sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove xserver-xorg-input-libinput

The last code will completely clean all the configuration files and data associated with libinput. Just reboot your computer after this and hopefully it'll start working again as it did in my case!