First of all, thank you @Thief@[email protected] for offering to help. You inspired me to go ahead and post an issue that’s been bothering me.
I posted about it on Reddit a while back and didn’t receive much in the way of assistance. I’m using an Inspiron 14 5410 and dualbooting Debian Bullseye and Windows 11. I recently started experiencing (again) touchpad issues. Initially it happened just after a Windows/BIOS update, then vanished after another one. Now after my most recent Windows update it’s returned. On boot my touchpad works fine, but periodically it will stop functioning. I am still fully able to click with my mouse buttons, but unable to move my cursor.
‘’‘xinput test 11’‘’ produces nothing unless I click a mouse button while the touchapd isn’t working. I’m not accidentally disabling it with a key either, I’ve checked for that. I’m running nonfree drivers/firmware. I can share output of xinput list and any other logs (with some advice on how to pull them) if necessary.
Closing and reopening my laptop (signing back in) corrects the issue. I’m not sure if Xserver restarts on a suspend/login?
Any nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thank you to any and all who can offer advice.
You already got some good advice where to start but I would also say these kind of sporadic issues are very hard to resolve. Also worth thinking about is the next version of Debian is about to release and is frozen right now so safe to upgrade to (bookworm). These kind of issues might already be fixed in a newer version if upgrading was possible. Try what was suggested by Parsnip in the other comments and report back on how you feel and want to progress. Can provide the sources.list for bookworm.
I had a very similar issue, the touchpad in my Dell laptop would randomly stop working but I could still click. I couldn’t work out why until one of my keys stopped working. I replaced the keyboard and the touchpad issues disappeared. I suspect the cause was the faulty keyboard not sending the key up event as I had noticed pressing keys sometimes unfroze it. It could also have been a loose connection though.
If you’re using GNOME, you could try disabling the “disable touchpad on while typing” setting:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing falseVerify the keyboard is not disabled when pressing keys and see if the issue still happens. If that fixes it then it might be keyboard that’s the problem.
To enable “disable touchpad while typing”:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing trueI’m not an expert in this but why don’t you run
dmesg -Tand find out if anything shows up in the kernel logs when it stops working? That can be a good starting point.Are you using libinput or synaptics driver? (I don’t know which one is bundled in Debian now). If you’re on libinput, you might have to make a custom config file for your device?
I’m honestly not even sure how to check which I’m running. I’ll check dmesg for any error logs though, thanks!
libinput list-devicesis your friend. You can also look for config files in/etc/x11/xorg.conf.d/Once you have something from dmesg I would be glad to help.
