[Project] Wayland Scroll Factor (WSF) — Fix/tune touchpad scroll speed on GNOME Wayland (alpha)

Hi everyone,

Over the years, many Framework Laptop 13 users running Linux with GNOME (Wayland) have complained about touchpad gesture “feel”, especially scroll sensitivity being too fast/too slow depending on setup, with no official, user-facing way to tune it system-wide. Despite repeated requests, GNOME/Wayland still doesn’t offer a simple setting for this.

Some people mentioned the old libinput-config workaround. It helped in the past, but today it can be inconsistent on newer stacks, sometimes has no effect at all on recent distro releases, and the setup is not exactly user-friendly.

Because of that (as I’ve mentioned in replies to other threads on this topic), I started a small project called Wayland Scroll Factor (WSF). It’s a GUI + CLI tool that lets you adjust touchpad gesture sensitivity using simple sliders/inputs. It doesn’t stop at vertical scrolling: it also supports horizontal scroll, pinch-to-zoom, and pinch-rotate (I personally needed tuning for these as well, especially for maps/photos).

Repo (alpha/testing):

In my case (Arch + GNOME on Wayland) it works really well, but it’s still testing/alpha, so I’d love help from other Framework users to validate it across different distros and GNOME versions.

Install is intentionally simple: I wrote a bootstrap script that attempts to:

  • install dependencies via your distro package manager (for now, it works with Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, but can work with other derivates),

  • clone the repo,

  • run a per-user install.

One-liner:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daniel-g-carrasco/wayland-scroll-factor/main/scripts/bootstrap.sh | bash

If you try it, the most useful feedback would be:

  • your distro + GNOME Shell version (Wayland),

  • whether scroll/pinch feel improves,

  • any regressions (mouse wheel, apps that behave oddly),

  • output of wsf doctor if something doesn’t work.

BTW: on my FW13 I ended up setting all the factors to 0.20, which feels like a good baseline for me.

Thanks in advance, and of course I still hope we’ll eventually get an official GNOME/Wayland control for this, but until then this should make day-to-day use much nicer for many of us.

Daniel

6 Likes

Will this work with Atomic desktops like Fedora Kinoite?

1 Like

on Fedora Kinoite (KDE Plasma) not yet.

WSF is currently GNOME/gnome-shell focused, and the preload library is intentionally a no-op unless the process is gnome-shell, so on Kinoite it won’t change anything.

I’m planning to add KWin (and wlroots) support later, that’s what would make it work properly on Kinoite.

Cachy OS with IBM x395 works great!:slight_smile:

1 Like

Zorin OS 18 Wayland. X1 Carbon Gen6. You deserve an award.

1 Like

My scrolling sensitivity was way to high on Ubuntu running on my Framework Laptop 12. Tried with the libinput-workaround before but that did not really work for me.

I then found this thread, tried it out and it just works. Thanks for making my life so much easier!
I also set the scrolling factors to 0,20 and that works for me. Zooming is a bit slow, so I might change that to something higher later.

Just a quick note: sometimes it does not apply automatically or resets when I change someting, but after signing out and in again, it just works.


Hardware Information:

  • Hardware Model: Framework Laptop 12 13th Gen Intel Core
  • Memory: 24.0 GiB
  • Processor: 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i3-1315U × 8
  • Graphics: Intel® Graphics (RPL-U)
  • Disk Capacity: 500.1 GB

Software Information:

  • Firmware Version: 03.07
  • OS Name: Ubuntu 25.10
  • OS Build: (null)
  • OS Type: 64-bit
  • GNOME Version: 49
  • Windowing System: Wayland
  • Kernel Version: Linux 6.17.0-22-generic
1 Like

Bazzite 44 Wayland on a DELL XPS 9500. Works like a charm (only tested vertical scroll). Just switch the dnf commands in bootstrap.sh with rpm-ostree then reboot then install.sh.

Thx! Hero without cape!

1 Like