Touchpad sometimes not working

I am getting this weird problem
My touchpad sometimes just doesn’t work, as if it isn’t there at all
by sometimes, i mean it’s like 90% working and 10% not working cases on boot
This happens when i boot the os
tried switching between kde and gnome(did a clean install with format everything) of manjaro and few other linux distro too, but same problem
but this problem doesn’t occur in windows
how do i fix this?
i have searched in other forums, of other distros as well, but didn’t find the solution
help would be appreciated
i am using hp pavilion 15 gaming ec0013dx modeel

HP, Lenovo and other Ryzen laptops had non-working touchpads with all Linux distros not so long ago. I thought it was sorted out with the 5.8 or 5.9 kernel. The 5.10 LTS kernel might make a difference for you.

But your touchpad working most of the time sounds like a different problem than not working at all. I can’t say for GNOME and Wayland but for X11 displays a touchpad can be tweaked many ways with a 30-touchpad.conf file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/.

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Hello
sorry for being late
i am using the 5.10 kernel lts now, downgraded from 5.13 as few forums said the issue is solved in 5.10 but the issue still persists in all the kernel versions i guess.
and yes i am on x11(kde)
can you say me more about the tweaks you mentioned?
i would like to try that as well.
the weird thing is the issue persists over all the distros of linux and not on the windows, so could it be that my touchpad is not compatible with linux or something?
i went to touchpad settings and saw this as my touchpad device: ELAN0718:01 04F3:30FD
probably compatibility issue between this hardware and linux
also, i am a total noob, pardon me if i am not able to clear my queries

I’m not the best adviser for touchpad tweaks but I do like to add a line to the default 30-touchpad.conf file that disables the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in. Other than that I get by with the basics in KDE’s touchpad settings. I just know that this file offers possibilities not available in GUI settings.

What’s most interesting is that your touchpad works and apparently stops working with recent kernels. So in your case I’m not as confident about 30-touchpad.conf tweaks as I would be about identifying compatibility issues. I see a pattern with touchpads on AMD laptops so I think kernel support is top priority.

One possibility to look at is the newer libinput driver versus the older Synaptics driver. Installing Manjaro’s Synaptics package might be worth a try. With KDE you should end up with a new GUI for touchpad settings. You may need to replace libinput references in your 30-touchpad.conf file with Synaptics. If none of that helps just remove the package and fall back to libinput.

Hi there!
I’m on HP Omen 15 with ryzen 4800H and RTX2060 and am experiencing the same issue.

screenfetch
 ██████████████████  ████████     
 ██████████████████  ████████     OS: Manjaro 21.1.3 Pahvo
 ██████████████████  ████████     Kernel: x86_64 Linux 5.10.63-1-MANJARO
 ██████████████████  ████████     Uptime: 16m
 ████████            ████████     Packages: 1657
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Shell: bash 5.1.8
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Resolution: 3840x1581
 ████████  ████████  ████████     DE: Cinnamon 5.0.5
 ████████  ████████  ████████     WM: Muffin
 ████████  ████████  ████████     WM Theme: Mint-Y-Dark-Teal (Mint-Y-Dark-Teal)
 ████████  ████████  ████████     GTK Theme: Mint-Y-Dark-Teal [GTK2/3]
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Icon Theme: Papirus-Adapta-Nokto-Maia
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Font: Cantarell 10
 ████████  ████████  ████████     Disk: 290G / 449G (68%)
                                  CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 4800H with Radeon Graphics @ 16x 2.9GHz
                                  GPU: NVIDIA Corporation TU106M [GeForce RTX 2060 Mobile] (rev a1)
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir (rev c6)
                                  RAM: 5459MiB / 15424MiB

If anybody has ideas, I’d like to bump this thread.

When the OS boots up without the touchpad libinput list-devices isn’t showing any touchpad devices:

libinput list-devices
Device:           Power Button
Kernel:           /dev/input/event2
Group:            1
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           Video Bus
Kernel:           /dev/input/event4
Group:            2
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           Power Button
Kernel:           /dev/input/event0
Group:            3
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           Lid Switch
Kernel:           /dev/input/event1
Group:            4
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     switch
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           HP Wide Vision HD Camera: HP Wi
Kernel:           /dev/input/event13
Group:            5
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           HOLTEK USB Wireless Device
Kernel:           /dev/input/event9
Group:            6
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           HOLTEK USB Wireless Device Mouse
Kernel:           /dev/input/event10
Group:            6
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     pointer 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      disabled
Nat.scrolling:    disabled
Middle emulation: disabled
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   button
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   flat *adaptive
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           HOLTEK USB Wireless Device System Control
Kernel:           /dev/input/event11
Group:            6
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           HOLTEK USB Wireless Device Consumer Control
Kernel:           /dev/input/event12
Group:            6
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           AT Translated Set 2 keyboard
Kernel:           /dev/input/event3
Group:            7
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

Device:           HP WMI hotkeys
Kernel:           /dev/input/event6
Group:            8
Seat:             seat0, default
Capabilities:     keyboard 
Tap-to-click:     n/a
Tap-and-drag:     n/a
Tap drag lock:    n/a
Left-handed:      n/a
Nat.scrolling:    n/a
Middle emulation: n/a
Calibration:      n/a
Scroll methods:   none
Click methods:    none
Disable-w-typing: n/a
Accel profiles:   n/a
Rotation:         n/a

If the touchpad isn’t detected I’m at a loss other than trying a newer kernel. That solves the problem with some Ryzen systems.

Did you managed to fix this ? Because I have the same problem too with the KDE . It happens sometimes doesn’t work when booting the laptop and I have to power off and on again unil it works . I have an HP AMD RYZEN 5 last gen too, with 5.13 kernel .

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I am facing the same problem too on ryzen 5 3500u with both 5.13 and 5.14 kernels on gnome.

I’m facing the exact same issue with my Lenovo Yoga 6 and Ryzen 7. So far I haven’t found the solution and it’s driving me nuts!

Okay, it seems like I spoke too soon. Output of dmesg gives me:

    ~  sudo dmesg | grep -i error                                                                                                                                           ✔  base  
[    0.598416] RAS: Correctable Errors collector initialized.
[    1.419249] i2c_hid_acpi: probe of i2c-BMA250E:00 failed with error -22
[    1.419352] i2c_hid_acpi: probe of i2c-MSFT0002:00 failed with error -22
[    1.419359] i2c_hid_acpi: probe of i2c-WACF2200:06 failed with error -22
[    1.809122] iwlwifi 0000:02:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-cc-a0-64.ucode failed with error -2

And it seems that reloading i2c_hid_acpi does the trick. So maybe a workaround for now would be to run modprobe -r i2c_hid_acpi && modprobe i2c_hid_acpi at initialization.

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Had the same issue, reloading i2c_hid_acpi did the trick, thanks.

Facing same issue, Dell Vostro 15 5515 with Ryzen 5700U. Running vanilla Arch with Gnome v 41.1. On kernel 5.15 sometimes touchpad doesn’t work at all, or two finger scroll doesn’t work. On LTS kernel branch rn on version 5.10.83 usually one restart fixes issue and touchpad begin to work normally. Tried almost everything, so far using LTS kernel was the best solution I found.

UPDATE: problem fixed by blacklisting psmouse module. I noticed, that xinput list returned correctly dell device and also incorrectly PS/2 mouse. Unloading psmouse kernel module from running system basically disabled touchpad. The solution was creating /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf file and adding blacklist psmouse line.

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