Inconsistent touchpad sensitivity

Ask Fedora
1

I’m using Fedora Workstation 43 on a Thinkpad P1 Gen 3. The sensitivity of the touchpad appears to be random across reboots. On some boots, everything works as expected. On others, moving the cursor works fine, but the amount of force necessary for a tap-to-click is unusably high. When tap-to-click is insensitive, other gestures like two-finger scroll and pinch-to-zoom also become inconsistent and unpredictable. Every time I reboot or resume from suspend, this changes randomly. Updates haven’t solved this. Is there anything I can do?

2

The Thinkpad P1 Gen 3 was released a few years ago, have you tried updating the touchpad firmware?

Show all discovered devices:

fwupdmgr get-devices

Update metadata, show available updates and install updates:

fwupdmgr refresh --force
fwupdmgr get-updates
fwupdmgr update
3

After running fwupdmgr refresh --force, fwupdmgr get-updates says no updates are available. (Ran fwupdmgr update anyway, and no updates were downloaded.)

4

Have you got a working solution? Please let me know. I have a Thinkpad P1 gen 3 too.

At first, I installed CachyOS KDE. Because of this problem, I replaced it with Fedora.

After a fresh install of Fedora KDE, everything seemed fine. But after the first update (over 5 GB), I started having the same problem.

I tried CachyOS GNOME after that, but because I got screen flickers, I quickly replaced it.

I thought it’s over after I installed Linux Mint. Even after the update, it’s fine yesterday. But today, the touchpad issue came up again.

I’d really like to have Linux as the main OS. I have Fedora KDE running fine on my Ideapad, but this Thinkpad is my primary laptop now -.-

5

I don’t have a solution so much as I have a janky workaround. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem like a problem anyone’s interested in really solving.

I switched briefly to CachyOS as well, and found that restarting the psmouse module had a chance of fixing the touchpad sensitivity, much like suspending and resuming but significantly quicker. I’ve since switched back to Fedora, but in its kernel, the psmouse module can’t be restarted manually because it’s built-in. I’ve changed to the CachyOS kernel mostly because of this issue; I don’t remember where, but I found a guide somewhere online on how to get that kernel on Fedora.

Once you have a kernel that doesn’t build-in psmouse, the command:

sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse

removes and re-adds the module, and about half of the time, it fixes my touchpad sensitivity. I often have to run it a few times and test the touchpad in between, but it’s faster than a full suspend.

6

Thank you for the quick reply, I really appreciate it. I’ve been “waiting” for the problem to re-occur to try that. It happened just a few minutes ago and the command worked right away :+1: