Mouse freezing / disconnection issues

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

Using KDE Plasma on a Dell Latitude 7440 (Intel) with laptop touchpad

This just started about four or so hours ago and issue hasn’t really gone away since. I can move my mouse just fine one second, and then it just stops responding to input the next. It seems to be able to respond again within a fraction of a second, but requires having to lift my finger from the touchpad, then put it back down for it to work again. The mouse doesn’t disappear, it just stops. It might also be stopping clicks / double-clicks, but that’s more difficult to notice. The time between one freeze and another is variable, but is around 3 seconds as of right now.

Things I’ve tried / looked at / noticed:

  • I already cleaned my touchpad, no dice
  • Using top, the issue shows that it’s not a problem with insufficient CPU
  • Restarted my computer, only fixed it for awhile
  • Might get worse when put to sleep?
  • Restarted gpm.service, did nothing
  • Used journalctl -f to see any errors, no errors when the mouse stops working.
  • Works just fine on other OSes (Windows)
  • Seems to be getting more frequent?
2

When you say disconnection issues do what do you refer to?

Have you looked at sudo dmesg

3

Welcome back @BrookePlays :waving_hand::smiley:

The first thing that comes to mind is ruling out whether it’s a hardware issue, or a driver issue.

Are you able to confirm that this behaviour is not consistent when the touchpad is used in the UEFI / BIOS, or if you have access to it, another non-Linux OS?

If it’s still happening in either of those, I’d suspect it’s a hardware issue.

4

By disconnection i mean it feels like the touchpad decides to just stop sending input to the computer. i just did sudo dmesg and theres nothing under the priorities of: error, warning, critical, alert, or emergency.

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5

I rechecked Windows for a longer period of time and it started doing it on there too. That prompted me to immediately open up my laptop and check the touchpad’s ribbons and connections (I was getting pretty pissed / worried atp). I disconnected and reconnected all the touchpad’s ribbons and then booted into Dell’s diagnostic mode to check the touchpad’s status, and it said everything is fine. Booted into EndeavourOS and now it’s not happening at all. I don’t know if it’s because the computer was off for a longer period of time, or there was something wrong with the ribbons, or its something that builds up over the system uptime.

Tbh not sure if I should close this or not since the issue is (temporarily?) resolved.

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6

Well that’s progress :smiley:

Perhaps leave the topic open for now, there’s no harm in that. Lets us know how it goes once you’ve been able to test a bit more :+1:

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