Keyboard and mouse inputs stopped working

Ask Fedora
1

Hi!

I am running Fedora 42 (I think - this is what came up when I tried to find out yesterday by using cat /etc/fedora-release) on a new T14 AMD Gen 5 and have had lots of issues since setting things up a couple of days ago, which I have been able to more or less navigate (or ignore :')).

But now suddenly both the laptop’s built-in keyboard and my external bluetooth keyboards stopped working.

Either nothing happens when I click on keys, or random things start happening (e.g. a tab on Firefox closed by pressing on a letter, but pressing on the letter again didn’t reproduce the same behaviour; other keys see, to refresh the tab but again not consistently). The three finger gesture still works so I can navigate from one window to another. Clicking for the most part doesn’t work either, unless I click on the apps in the dock. The power button doesn’t work either so I can’t reboot it. Now it’s gone to sleep and I can’t log in as I can’t type anything in the password field…

The only thing I have is a photo of the Firefox Parent process Browser console, which randomly opened while trying different keys:

IMG_20250418_112441
IMG_20250418_1124411920×1440 441 KB

External mouse and keyboard work fine when using them with my surface tablet.

Things that have also happened since yesterday that might have played a role:

  • Some updates were installed when rebooting yesterday
  • This morning I moved my keyboard and laptop to another location and on the way it seems the keyboard woke the laptop (or the laptop never went to sleep) and lots of characters were written in the password field, but both keyboards were working fine then.
  • I had a wifi issue so I tried both suspending the laptop (didn’t fix the wifi issue) then rebooted (which fixed the wifi issue). But soon after, the keyboard stopped working.

Any suggestions/help? Also considering I don’t see how I can log back in.

This is my first time using Linux after about a decade of Mac and Windows use so I’m feeling a bit discouraged :')

2

OK, literally just as I pressed send, I managed to click my way into suspending the laptop, and that seemed to fix the issue for now! But still very strange! And also concerning in case all inputs stop working in future. I’m a bit hesitant to rely entirely on Fedora for work so also curious to know if you have any recommendations (e.g. would using an earlier version of Fedora be more stable?) and if there is anything I could do if this happens again and suspension doesn’t work.

3

You might check that you have a usb keyboard/mouse. This way you will not depend on bluetooth.

F42 comes with the new kernel 6.14 which should also bring new improvements for AMD. This might not happens straight away.

You might also have to verifier if you get a new update for your hardware. You can try to use:

fwupdmgr get-devices

to see if there are new drivers for your hardware which work better with the newer kernel.