TL;DR I need ELAN touchpad/TrackPoint drivers for Ubuntu 22.04 on ThinkPad E14 Gen 4, or a suitable alternative, to fix touchpad stability in a dual-booted system. What to do?
I have a ThinkPad E14 Gen 4 (Intel), and I am dual-booting Windows 11 Pro and Ubuntu 22.04 on it. I did not want to mix up the OSes in any way, and wanted to keep Windows' BitLocker on, so I got a second SSD installed in my laptop by Lenovo, and Ubuntu lives there.
For the most part, everything is fantastic, even the fingerprint reader. However, I am running into an issue with my touchpad/TrackPoint. At any given time, if it's working fine, it starts misbehaving if I boot from one OS to another, and then back to the first one. The behaviour presents itself in one of two ways, seemingly at random:
- The touchpad and TrackPoint stop working altogether
- The scrolling and multi-touch functionality of the touchpad stop working, but clicking and dragging elements works fine. The TrackPoint also stops scrolling.
I tried several times to (re)install drivers in Windows, and it never helps. The only thing that works is going into UEFI Diagnostics and resetting the mouse, and this is a temporary solution.
According to Lenovo support, this is a software problem because they don't provide touchpad drivers for my laptop on Ubuntu, because I got this device built to custom specs instead of ordering a standard one. Their advice is that I should boot one OS at a time, and not frequently switch. However, I genuinely need both: I'm an electrical engineering student and our uni uses some Windows-only designing/simulation software; I develop projects with embedded systems and ROS2 on Linux, and it's a pain to do it via virtualization/WSL.
How can I get my trackpad working in a stable way? Note that I'm comfortable in a Linux terminal due to experience from WSL, Docker, and Raspberry Pi, but I'm very new to Linux GUIs.
