Trackpad issues on Linux: no pinching and vertical scrolling too fast

[Raph]

I run pop!_os 21.04 and the trackpad generally works very well. However, I have two major issues:

• Two-finger vertical scrolling is way too fast, making it hard to slowly scroll down a page. Changing the touchpad speed in Settings doesn’t affect the two-finger scroll speed. Horizontal scrolling works just fine.
• Pinching doesn’t work, including in programs (like Figma) that usually support it.

Anyone else experienced those, or has suggestions on how to fix it?

[Jacob_Padgett]

Since Pop!_OS is Ubuntu-based, this discussion about fast two-finger scrolling on Ubuntu might be useful to you.

The interesting comments/potential fixes start here:

Looking for help adjusting trackpad scroll speed on Ubuntu

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.

[Eugene_Gorelikov]

I’m on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Gnome 42.1. While the rest of the drivers work out of the box, the trackpad still does not recognize pinching and three finger swiping. Is there a fix to this?

[Adam_Spiers]

On openSUSE Tumbleweed here with a 12th gen Intel; horizontal and vertical scrolling work flawlessly in Figma within Chrome, but pinch zoom doesn’t work at all until I install JoseExposito/touchegg: Linux multi-touch gesture recognizer with this config:

  <application name="Google-chrome,Chromium-browser">
    <gesture type="PINCH" fingers="2" direction="IN">
      <action type="SEND_KEYS">
        <repeat>true</repeat>
        <modifiers>Control_L</modifiers>
        <keys>KP_Subtract</keys>
        <decreaseKeys>KP_Add</decreaseKeys>
      </action>
    </gesture>
 
    <gesture type="PINCH" fingers="2" direction="OUT">
      <action type="SEND_KEYS">
        <repeat>true</repeat>
        <modifiers>Control_L</modifiers>
        <keys>KP_Add</keys>
        <decreaseKeys>KP_Subtract</decreaseKeys>
      </action>
    </gesture>
  </application>

at which point it starts reacting to pinch zoom gestures but is basically unusable:

• Sometimes a pinch zoom gesture in one direction results in zooming in one direction for a second followed by immediate zooming in the opposite direction, and then maybe back again.
• Since the gesture is being translated into Control + or Control - keypresses, it is of course not at all smooth.

The workaround is to hold Control and use vertical scrolling which achieves smooth zooming.

[2disbetter]

@Eugene_Gorelikov

I’m on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Gnome 42.1.

Are you using the OEM provided Ubuntu driver that the Framework installation guide mentions?