Touchpad

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This meta article acts as a hub of shared knowledge for FOSS touchpad configuration efforts. Improving the state of touchpads is a continual improvement effort in the Linux ecosystem. With support enabled in the kernel, configuration can be performed in a variety of locations. Modern desktop environments build off device drivers exposed from libinput.

Known components

Name	Linux hardware	Description
Alps_PS/2	Device 'ALPS AlpsPS/2 DualPoint TouchPad'	CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2_ALPS

Available software

Desktop environments

Desktop environments generally include their own controls for touchpads customization. These can include hot corners, scroll behavior, pinch to zoom, etc.

• GNOME
  • Graphically the Settings menu (gnome-base/gnome-settings-daemon - included with GNOME) and GNOME Tweaks (gnome-extra/gnome-tweaks).
  • From the commandline via gsettings (available via dev-libs/glib).
• KDE Plasma
  • ?
• Xfce
• System settings
• LXDE
  • ?
• Sway
• i3

Other

• Xorg can be used to configure touchpad behavior directly in the xorg.conf file. Various drivers, such as Libinput or Synaptics can be used to drive the hardware via Xorg.

Features

Disable while typing

Disable while typing (DWT) support can be activated as a feature of the desktop environment or directly via libinput driver. Each DE has a different settings path in order to activate the feature.

See also

• libinput — an input device driver for Wayland compositors and X.org window system.

External resources

• https://linuxtouchpad.org/ - A project dedicated to making touchpads on Linux systems behave in a manner similar to touchpads on MacBooks.