[Desktop] Touchpad keeps stopping working

[stevedundee]

Hi

I have two problems with my laptop touchpad that arise seemingly randomly. They started perhaps a month ago maybe a bit more, before which everything was fine.

From time to time (maybe more likely but not exclusively after the laptop wakes from sleep), my touchpad periodically stops working completely - the cursor arrow does not move and clicking does nothing. I can fix it for a while by pressing my left and/or right shift key a number of times. Before I discovered this fix, I would have to do a shutdown and start. If I just did a restart the touchpad would still not be working but I noticed the panels bars seemed to be in tablet mode rather than laptop mode.

Also about half the time two-finger scrolling on the touchpad does not scroll the window. It's working just now, but was not earlier on. Dragging the scroll bar or touching and dragging the screen still work at these times.

These problems are not obviously linked in that the scrolling can break while the pointer still works (though perhaps not vice versa - if the pointer stops I think the whole touchpad has stopped working).

If anyone knows how to stop this happening, I'd be happy to hear it, but these issues are pretty annoying but not critical, so I am mainly hoping to make relevant folk aware.

Oooh - the pointer stopped working just now! I got it going by multiply pressing the right shift key. I can see nothing referring to "touchpad" at the relevant time in syslog.

Info Centre tells me this about my laptop:

Operating System: Kubuntu 25.10
KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0
Qt Version: 6.9.2
Kernel Version: 6.17.0-8-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 @ 2.40GHz
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics
Manufacturer: HP
Product Name: HP Pavilion x360 Convertible 14-dy0xxx
System Version: Type1ProductConfigId

Thanks!

Steve

[Snowhog]

I would install plasma-session-x11 (sudo apt install plasma-session-x11) from the command line, then logout and log in, selecting Plasma (X11) as the session and see if things improve.

[stevedundee]

I would install plasma-session-x11 (sudo apt install plasma-session-x11) from the command line, then logout and log in, selecting Plasma (X11) as the session and see if things improve.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm giving that a go and I'll report back after a few days of experience.

[stevedundee]

Sadly that didn't help. The problems have continued as before.

I suppose this might be a driver issue? Perhaps odd that the 2 functions (two-finger scrolling and moving the mouse) seem to be affected independently of each other. And even when two-finger scrolling stops working I can still click the pointer into a new position - it is very specifically two-finger scrolling that stops working. Perhaps there are 2 issues.

Thanks for your suggestion anyway!

[stevedundee]

I am beginning to think this could be a hardware failure. The touchpad now does not work at all and System Settings says there is no touchpad. Could this be caused by firmware or driver problems, or is it more likely to be hardware?

I have reverted to a USB mouse and this is working fine so at least I should hit my Open University assignment deadline!