How do I make my Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition touchpad work correctly in 18.04?

Question

I've got the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop, of which I am a big fan. My touchpad works in 17.10 without a problem, but when I boot into 18.04, I get bad behaviour. I can move the pointer, but it's jerky, and just stops following my touchpad movement.

It works fine when I boot to a 17.10 USB key. Using a USB mouse also works fine. The problem occurs when I have a USB mouse connected or not.

I get the same behaviour when I start an Xorg session or a Wayland session, so my guess is that the problem is at a lower level, like the kernel.

Answer 1

I had the same problem (xps13, update to 18.04) and did the same as in Synaptic touchpad on laptop not working:

sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

Answer 2

This fixed my Dell XPS (Cyprus touchpad) issue on Mate Ubuntu 18.04. I saw the issue in both Mate and regular Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-all

Then reboot

Answer 3

I installed xf86-input-synaptics and I made some changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-synaptics.conf.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
sudo cp /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/70-synaptics.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

You can check what settings Synaptics with:

synclient -l

and you can try some settings like:

synclient TapButton1=1

I think this is not perfect, but now I can sleep well.

Ref:

• Ubuntu Forum / Ubuntu 16.04 touchpad not working
• Arch Linux / Synaptics タッチパッド (Japanese)