I’ve been having a serious issue with phantom clicks on a laptop, to a point is nearly impossible to work on a desktop.
At first I assumed it was something related with a bluetooth daemon call that kept returning an error on startup. I forced access to a CLI and managed to uninstall the bluez package but the issue persisted.
I assumed then it was an issue with the mouse itself but after unplugging it completely, using the touchpad had the same behaviour. I also tried tweaking the mouse settings, to no difference.
Finally, I tried booting into Windows, as this machine has a dual boot, and there both mouse and touchpad report no erratic bahaviour.
After a few online searches, I found similar issues reported but back in 2014, mostly related with kernel drivers, which by now must be solved, as the system initially didn’t had this issue, with a fresh install.
The only non-repo app the system has is Zoom and, again, it didn’t started having this issue when installed.
Can someone spare some advice on this?
My temptation is to just do a fresh install but as I once read somewhere “we don’t do that here”. :)
The distro being run is Mint, on a generic Intel based laptop.
I highly suspect the culprit is the touchpad. I have a pretty modern ASUS Zenbook laptop and its touchpad has horrible palm rejection on Linux, but works just fine on Windows. I often move the cursor to a point where a click wouldn’t do anything, like the bottom panel in KDE Plasma, or just outright disable it for that session. My guess would be that ASUS is sending nonstandard signals to the OS which is then misinterpreted by poor libinput. My next laptop will definitely be a Framework or Tuxedo, just because of this annoyance.
I’ll try to deactivate the touch pad, via software. But if that was the case, for the start, this behaviour would manifest. It started randomly, after a few weeks of use.