Touchpad/Trackpad doesn't work reliably

I’m not sure if this is a linux thing or a hardware thing, but I’m having trouble making the touchpad work reliably

I think it is unlikely a hardware thing because when I reboot my computer it starts being fine again.

About my laptop settings
General
Kubuntu 20.04
KDE Plasma: 5.18.8
KDE Frameworks: 5.68.0
Qt Version: 5.12.8
kernal version: 5.13.0-39-generic
CPU: i5-1135G7
I am not on Wayland.

Touchpad: I’m using synaptics
I disabled libinput.conf
and maybe synaptics.conf my main conf.

last night it just didn’t work - not at all. I just looked at the settings and touchpad was not on disable when an external mouse was connected and nothing worked. I think I may have tried unplugging the mouse a few times too.

I’m not sure if disabling ps2 in the Bios would help because
When I ran xinput, it was detecting the Touchpad
When I ran xinput --list-props, it was saying that it was using synaptics.

and then the day before yesterday… scrolling stopped working until the next time I logged in.

Why I am using synaptics
libinput has subpar two-finger right click. It would work in the beginning and then it’d just… stopped working. I’ve been able to get two finer taps to work but two-finger clicks are a different story.
The KDE system settings for libinput touchpad has not been particularly consistent.

I posted a response here if you’d like more details on my setup (the exact details of my synaptics configuration is outdated): Two finger right click in Fedora KDE 34 - #3 by iamef

1 Like

Update:

  1. I disabled disabling ps2 in the Bios. I don’t know if this did anything.

  2. I decided to use libinput because synaptics is deprecated. Which actually meant making the xx-synaptics.conf to be 30-synaptics since the 40-libinput.conf loads later and the thing that loads later will be the one that actually gets loaded which is strange. (confirmed based on seeing /var/log/Xorg.0.log)
    I figured out how to get 2 finger right click to work on libinput which is very exciting!

Will wait another week before updating about reliability.