Looking for help adjusting trackpad scroll speed on Ubuntu

I have this problem as well and haven’t been able to find a solution. It seems silly that gnome doesn’t just have a slider for this, but it means I have to scroll very carefully otherwise I will overshoot things. It really makes using Ubuntu feel unpolished right now. I tried the firefox specific settings but didn’t get anything to change there.

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Sorry I am late to the game, you can adjust it usually in the Gnome Tweaks tool, but if you need to install the Touchpad Indicator there you can adjust it as well, but that works best with the Unity Desktop Environment.

Also what version of Ubuntu are you running 21.04 or 21.10? Because I am having no issues on my regular laptop. It could be something related to the ELAN Touchpad equivalent driver on Linux. I would seriously look into reinstalling the touchpad driver. Also installing the hardware drivers within the Software and Drivers help as well.

You should also check possibly for broken packages related to this issue in the Synaptic Package Manager and or restarting the touchpad driver.

This is with 21.04 in Gnome. There isn’t an option in Gnome Tweaks that I know of for us at least.

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I too am on Ubuntu 21.04 and can not find any such slider in the tweak app.

Anyone figure something out here? I haven’t been messing with it much as I am working mostly in docked mode these days, but scrolling on the trackpad remains overly sensitive all the time for me, I now have PS/2 emulation disabled and am running all the latest stuff on 21.04.

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Maybe try out the Ubuntu support forums? Speaking for myself, I’m not having any issues with Gnome 40 on Debian, but it may be that my idea of “overly sensitive” isn’t the same as yours and my machine is, in fact, behaving exactly the same and I just happen to like it. :slight_smile:

I have been messing around with this project- it seems like this is clearly a gnome/wayland issue that I haven’t run into before because I have been using 20.04 up until now (which uses xorg by default)

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That’s a nice find! That got me curious, and I ran across this clever little hack, in case folks aren’t comfortable adding that project to their system for whatever reason:

The gist is they override the detected trackpad dimensions, which affects the scroll speed, and then make the change persistent using a udev script.

This worked for me!
I set ‘scroll-factor=.2’ which seemed to do the trick. Totally useable scrolling now on wayland.

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For Firefox specifically, assuming you’re using Wayland, try disabling mousewheel.system_scroll_override.enabled and apz.gtk.kinetic_scroll.enabled in about:config and see how that feels.

This fixed it for me. I was getting insane scroll speeds in Firefox on Ubuntu 21.04

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Continuing the discussion from Looking for help adjusting trackpad scroll speed on Ubuntu:

This worked! I was only having the issue with Firefox, so I’m glad I didn’t try altering any config files and only edited the about:config. Thank you for finding this. Oh, and I’m not on a framework (yet), but I keep an eye on the forum for when I do finally get my batch 5. For anyone wondering; I’m running Fedora 34 on a Macbook Air 2013.

worked for me too, thank you!

This worked for me. Scrolling in Firefox is now more reasonable, though it would be better if easily configurable in gnome

This worked for me even though I’m using xorg on Ubuntu 20.04.

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This made a big difference for me in Firefox on Fedora 35. Although I still wish it was more configurable from an OS perspective.

Thanks!

I will note here that sway exposes the scroll_factor property available in libinput, which should do what you want (system-wide).

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This worked for me with Sway on Arch Linux. Thanks!

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I’ve tried this same fix but it only seems to work for certain apps. Scrolling in Firefox works great now, but scrolling in the “Files” app and others does not. I’m guessing that this is based on how the apps are made, but still frustrating to never know if your scrolling will work or not.

Hey, Gnome has this issue specially with firefox.
One way you can limit the speed is by lowering the value of the variable mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y on about:config

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This is still relevant in Ubuntu 22.04. Firefox was a pain to use without this fix. Thanks Michael