I know the summary might sound weird, but it was the shortest summary I could come up with. The issue is as follows: The new lenovo thinkpads (e.g. T440) have a new touchpad, which include the mouse buttons. This means that you can either tap on the touchpad or press it down to "click". There are no longer separate buttons above or below the touchpad itself. Besides the touchpad, the lenovo thinkpad also has a little red stick between the keys that can be used as a mouse. With my old laptop I always switched off the touchpad and used the little red stick to move the mouse. With my new T440 I tried to do the same, but this ends up in the situation that the "click" function of the touchpad is also deactivated. I tried to find some settings to prevent this, but no luck. I had to revert to using synclient with the option TouchpadOff=1. This works and I can use the touchpad for the click-buttons. Please let me know if you need more information. Reproducible: Always
I forgot to mention that this is with the Frameworks based version. I am not sure if it works correctly with the KDE4 based version.
Copying Rajeesh on the bug report as that he did the KF5 porting. :)
I know about this problem. It's present in KDE 4 version too. But I can't fix it without breaking compatibility with ktouchpadenabler. Ideally, ktouchpadenabler's functionality should be integrated into kcm-touchpad. But currently it's too big task for me. Not enough time, sadly.
I just tried ktouchpadenabler and this one has the same issue. Also here switching off the touchpad disables the click functionality. I understood that as soon as this is integrated with Plasma-workspace, that ktouchpadenabler would be dropped in favor of touchpad_kcm. That is the reason why I copied Rajeesh on this bug as well
I know nothing about touchpads, I just ported to KF5 because I needed it to work ;-) Just remembered this article (and related ones) from Peter Hutterer: http://who-t.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/xorg-synaptics-support-for-lenovo-t440.html Someone more knowledgable, like Alexander, could take a look at it (if not already done so) and advise? Also, see the patch attached in bug#342629 for a quick 'n dirty implemenation of taking over global shortcuts for touchpad enable/disable/toggle.
Hello! This bug report concerns the Synaptics version of the Touchpad page, which is no longer supported in Plasma 6. Can you please see if the issue still happens when using Libinput? Thanks!
I have Lenovo T14 now, which has combined touchpad: it has physical buttons (for left, middle and right mouse buttons), and also it can be clicked itself (i.e. be used as clickpad). On Plasma 6, I disabled the touchpad in System Settings, and can confirm that it disables the clickpad functionality. At the same time, the physical buttons (left, middle, right) and the trackpoint remains working, so this "bug" is not such an issue on this laptop. My guess is that the physical buttons on top of the T14's touchpad are actually belonging to another "mouse/pointing device" (the one that corresponds to the trackpoint), so that is why they remain working when disabling touchpad. I currently could not test on another laptop with clickpad only (i.e. without the trackpoint and without physical buttons). I do not remember now, but most likely that was an issue for me, that is why I subscribed to this bug. But, iirc, in some of the weekly Nate's articles, there was a mentioning that disabling touchpad on laptops without connected mouse now shows the warning to user?
Yup, I can reproduce that. My Lenovo with trackpoint behaves the same way. I guess with the Libinput driver, this works as expected now.