Score:1

GNOME's touchpad and mouse settings completely changed after installing XFCE4 on Ubuntu 20.04

br flag

On my Ubuntu 20.04 installation, in addition to GNOME, I installed XFCE as an additional DE. After doing this (and not changing any settings) I noticed that my touchpad began behaving differently across all desktop environments. So when switching back to GNOME, the XFCE default touchpad settings are still applied.

Specifically:

  • Natural scrolling can no longer be enabled in the horizontal direction.
  • Accelaration feels different to GNOME's preset.
  • No more palm rejection when typing.
  • Scrolling inertia enabled (pages keep scrolling for a bit after releasing fingers from touchpad)

Things I have tried:

  • Purging XFCE from my system.
  • Searching the dconf editor for relevant settings which I've seen other forum posts telling me to change.
  • Manual changes using xinput, but these aren't persistent, and I would like to find the exact config file causing these issues.

How can I get back to GNOME's default touchpad settings?

guiverc avatar
cn flag
Multiple DEs can have complexities (I'm a *lover* of multiple DEs so am a little experienced with some *quirks*).. I usually (*when I notice changes like you describe*) look at config files that changed on installation of the new desktop (ie. *files that have date/time stamp marked at install time; which can be found in apt logs*). This is usually easily discovered before you try too many other things to revert/fix the issue (ie. easier when you've got fewer changes). ie `find -mtime` (`-mmin` etc) type exploration..
br flag
@guiverc thank you for the suggestion. In hindsight that would have been a good thing to do, alas I think I have made too many changes to be able to detect the source of the problem...
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