Does the Plasma Touchpad not work well for you? Try this

Kubuntu touchpad settings

When I installed Kubuntu on my new laptop (hello to whoever told me on Amazon that Linux cannot be installed…), I noticed something that I didn't like at all: the touchpad is both very sensitive and lacks sensitivity. This means that it moves with any touch, but sometimes it does not detect clicks if the pointer does not move a little before. Also, many of the preferences options are inaccessible. If it happens to you, here is a little trick to enable your touchpad options in KDE Plasma.

The problem is in the driver that comes by default in some operating systems that use Plasma. If we leave it as it is, in many cases the left button, the right button, the central button works, we can activate the clicks when touching the touchpad and more, but we cannot configure any parameters of the sensitivity, nor the gestures nor nothing. We can solve this by installing the correct driver, which in my case is the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.

Install the drivers for your Touchpad to access all its options

The process is very simple and will depend on each computer. In my case this problem has been fixed by following these simple steps:

  1. We open a terminal and write "sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics".
  2. We restart the computer. Upon entering the touch panel options we will see that they are all accessible.

In other cases, the required driver is xf86-input-synaptics, so it would be necessary to replace step 1 above and add the correct driver. The bad? It depends on the computer. In my case, right now I have to get used to doing some things again because before I could touch the touchpad a little and it did not detect it. Now I have to be more careful or I can't perform some tasks accurately.

Have you managed to get all the options of your touchpad working in Plasma?

plasma 5.15.2
Related article:
Plasma 5.15.4 now available, fixes including improvements for Nvidia drivers

2 comments, leave yours

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  1.   SergioN said

    Thanks!!!
    The first proposal served me, for an Acer Aspire E15 that brought me down the street of bitterness, always with a dragging mouse.

  2.   Mario said

    Good afternoon,

    I have a new Lenovo without an operating system, and I have not only installed Ubuntu 20.04, and I am going crazy because the Touchpad does not work for me and I have installed the first line you indicate and it does not work, and the second does not detect it.
    I have also searched other pages and the same ... What can I do ???

    Thank you very much