Arch Linux

Frontear

Member

Registered: 2023-05-22

Posts: 29

Touchpad works very poorly

Unfortunately wish I could give more info, but I'm truly at a loss. I'm using Hyprland, a Wayland Compositor with a vast majority of libinput things disabled, such as tap-to-click, drag-scroll, 2fg-scroll etc etc, leaving it almost bare basic, and although the touchpad works much better, there are still moments where it becomes completely unresponsive and I need to press it hard 1-2 times to get it to start moving again. Sometimes it takes 3-5 clicks, all over the place, double hard click, etc etc, just some random hard gesture to make it just somehow work. I'm not even sure how to begin debugging this because I'm not missing firmware, libinput doesn't seem to have a lot to work with, and on a live iso run of Fedora, the touchpad works perfectly fine so its definitely not a hardware issue.

I definitely haven't ruled out Hyprland being an issue, but almost nobody else has reported this, so I figured I could at least come here and get a good idea of where to start debugging this before taking it up with the Hyprland devs.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,766

Re: Touchpad works very poorly

sudo libinput debug-events

if the events are "sporadic" there as well we either have a kernel or libinput problem - if they are responding correctly it will be hyprland. Have you tested e.g. the LTS kernel? FWIW if you really don't actually want to use any of these features, check in your UEFI/BIOS whether you have an option to disable "advanced touchpad features" or similar, which will often lessen the complexity of the device on a firmware/HW level.

Frontear

Member

Registered: 2023-05-22

Posts: 29

Re: Touchpad works very poorly

Hi sorry for the incredibly late followup. Ran debug-events and it will detect events fine, but occasionally it will report POINTER_MOTION as POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER even though only one finger is on the touchpad. This is also coincidentally when the mouse movements stop and it becomes unresponsive, but debug-events will continue to report POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER. At some point it'll start reporting POINTER_MOTION again but the mouse will not move.

Here's essentially what happens:

1. I move finger on touchpad, as expected POINTER_MOTION is reported
2. It will randomly stop registering my touchpad movement, and events change to POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER
3. events change back to POINTER_MOTION, but cursor continues to be unresponsive.
4. I need to lift my finger off the touchpad, possibly click to get it to respond, then move again for the cursor to work.

It looks like a hardware issue, but I can confirm with 100% confidence windows works the touchpad perfectly fine. Perhaps its a firmware issue but I can't find anything about a touchpad specific firmware for this laptop, suppose I could check dmesg for anything of the sort. I'm not really sure what's going on.

I do actually want to use these features, the only reason I've turned them off is because the touchpad almost "feels" like it responds better with them off.

EDIT:

Nothing on dmesg at all and LTS kernel is having the same issue as described above ^. I'm also noticing touchpad movements are not 1:1 with my finger, if I make circle motions on the touchpad the cursor will drift into the top right or bottom left even though I'm hovering the same relative area, though this could be because of the acceleration-profile which is adaptive.

EDIT2: Booted into fallback, instead of getting POINTER_SCROLL_FINGER I got GESTURE_SWIPE_UPDATE, once again with only 1 finger on the touchpad at all times.

Last edited by Frontear (2023-10-02 20:08:57)