The touchpad on my laptop isn’t working for me. It was working fine with the GNOME, KDE, and XFCE interfaces, but when I installed Lubuntu, it stopped working. What is the solution?
It would help to know a bit more about your hardware — especially your laptop model and the output of:
xinput list
and
sudo dmesg | grep -i touch
In many cases, touchpad issues on Lubuntu are related to the driver backend (libinput) or missing modules. You can also try enabling it manually:
sudo modprobe i2c_hid
or checking whether the touchpad is disabled in LXQt settings.
Share the details above and we can help you troubleshoot further.
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⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Ideapad extra buttons id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
[ 1.366559] input: ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input4
Thanks for the output — it’s helpful.
Your system detects the Elantech touchpad correctly, which means the hardware is working, but Lubuntu (LXQt) may not be loading the right configuration.
Here are a few things you can try:
Check if the touchpad is disabled in LXQt
Open:
Preferences → LXQt Settings → Mouse and Touchpad
Make sure the touchpad is enabled, and try toggling “Tap to click”.
Show touchpad properties
This will help confirm if all features are loaded:
xinput list-props "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad"
If you can share the output, we can pinpoint the missing feature or driver.
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Specifics matter, but you provided few.
Ubuntu and flavors share the same base, however there are some different defaults between them, but you’re without any release or kernel stack defaults.
GNOME is used by Ubuntu Desktop; it has different kernel stack defaults to the flavors for LTS point release media (initial & .1), but all flavors have the same defaults; did you install using different release media?? You can change defaults via package changes as per Ubuntu HWE kernel documentation… assuming that’s your issue, but you gave no comparison.
Both Kubuntu and Lubuntu use the calamares installer for 24.04 & newer releases, which differ to Xubuntu & Ubuntu Desktop - but again no release detail was provided; the difference here is minimal, with Ubuntu Desktop offering OEM kernel stack options that Lubuntu media & calamares does not offer.
Moved to support and help so you can get the support you need.
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I did a bit of research on this, and since your touchpad is detected correctly and the driver is loaded, this appears to be a known LXQt behavior rather than a hardware or driver issue.
On Lubuntu, tap-to-click is often not enabled by default, and the option may not appear in the LXQt GUI, unlike GNOME, KDE, or XFCE.
You can try one of the following solutions:
Option 1 (Permanent solution)
Create a libinput configuration file:
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf
Add the following:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "touchpad"
Driver "libinput"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
Option "Tapping" "on"
Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
Option "DisableWhileTyping" "true"
EndSection
Then reboot:
reboot
Option 2 (Temporary test)
Enable tap-to-click immediately (not persistent):
xinput list
xinput set-prop "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" "libinput Tapping Enabled" 1
This explains why the touchpad worked on GNOME / KDE / XFCE but not on Lubuntu (LXQt) — those desktops apply libinput defaults automatically, while LXQt does not.
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The issue has been resolved for a while now. It turned out to be a minor oversight; I just didn’t know where the ‘Tap to Click’ setting was located to enable it.
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