Middle mouse button and track pointer (nipple) scroll doesn't work

[penchua (Penchua Do)]

Hi,
I am using Fedora 43 with GNOME on an HP Zbook which has a track pointer (aka. nipple) and three mouse buttons with the trackpad. Ideally I would have assumed that depressing the middle button and moving the track pointer would let me scroll up and down. I tried to find settings on GNOME setting, it didn’t have any options for scrolling using track pointer and using the middle button. I have also tried to downgrading libinput to 1.29 (currently on 1.30) - that didn’t help either.

Any suggestions or help would be great!

[digitalman (Guy)]

I was just trying to do something similar with a trackball. There is some good info here that might lead you to a solution.

Logitech Marble Mouse - ArchWiki

You can see my post about it here:

Logitech Trackman / Marble USB trackball scroll wheel emulation?

I use a Logitech Trackman / Marble USB trackball on my F43 Gnome/Wayland install. This trackball does not have a hardware scroll wheel. I wanted to try defining a scroll modifier in hopes that it would allow me to hold down one mouse button and move the ball to emulate a scroll wheel. As usual, the Arch wiki has the the exact instructions on how to do this but I haven’t been able to get it to work: Since I’m using Gnome/Wayland, I did: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.trackball …

[shawthing (James Buttenshaw)]

I had the same issue as Penchua but with a Dell Latitude 7490. I first noticed the issue updating Fedora 42 but rolling back libinput to the 1.28 version fixed it. It recently recurred and upgrading to Fedora 43 didn’t fix it. A bit of AI plus digitalman’s links lead me to the solution; it seems the default scroll method for ‘pointingstick’ may have changed in libinput or gnomesettings?

Either way, using dconf editor to change the pointingstick ‘scroll-method’ to ‘on-button-down’ solved my problem (just search ‘pointingstick’ in dconf editor).