Craig Weber

I recently bought a cheap little computer and threw Linux Mint on it, and to minimize cord clutter, I wanted to replace my USB mouse with my Magic Trackpad 2. Mostly it worked reasonably well out of the box, but I did have to make a few manual changes. This post documents the problems I ran into, how I solved them, and what remains to be solved.

Mostly the trackpad worked as expected. It kept pairing to my MacBook Pro, so I had to move the latter across the room and then I could pair it to my Linux machine. The basic clicking and cursor movements worked fine, but scrolling was really aggressive and I couldn't use gestures to change workspaces like I'm used to.

Gestures

This was the easiest part. Just open the "Gestures" app from the menu, enable gestures (from the Settings tab), and then set the 3 finger swipe gestures accordingly:

In all cases, "Trigger at gesture start" should be set, or else the gesture will feel delayed.

If you want to debug gestures, you can run touchegg --debug in a terminal window and it will print the gestures it receives (Linux Mint uses touchegg to listen for gestures from input devices).

Scrolling sensitivity

Linux Mint uses libinput for its input devices. There's no real documentation about how to change touchpad sensitivity (at least nothing that was coming up in my extensive Googling), but I was able to piece some stuff together from various fora and experimentation:

The TL;DR is that you have to paste something like this into your terminal whenever you log in (not sure how to best persist this yet):

xinput set-prop "Apple Inc. Magic Trackpad 2" "libinput Scrolling Pixel Distance" 40

We're setting the "scrolling pixel distance" property to 40, which roughly matches my expectations coming from Mac. Lower values are more sensitive, and valid values are from 10-50 (10 being the most aggressive/sensitive scrolling and 50 being the least). None of this is documented anywhere online though, and curiously the valid band of values repeats every 256 values, meaning that -246, 10, and 266 all code for the most sensitive/aggressive scrolling experience and -206, 50, and 306 all code for the least aggressive experience.

Remaining issues

• Bluetooth does not connect automatically when the system starts up. This is true for all Bluetooth devices (including the keyboard, which means I can't log in without a USB keyboard, and thus I will have to figure something out in the near future). I guess no desktop Linux developer has bluetooth peripherals that they've wanted to autoconnect before, because there's no canonical tool to solve this problem (that I've come across in Googling, anyway), so I suspect I'll just write some script around bluetoothctl and a corresponding systemd unit that will make sure the script is always running.

• I can't figure out how to persist the scrolling sensitivity changes, so I have to re-run the xinput command every time I log in. I'm sure there's some ~/foorc file I can stick this in--again, it's sort of crazy that no Linux developer has ever needed to persist their touchpad settings. Maybe they'll address this and the Bluetooth concern and 2026 will truly be the Year of the Linux Desktop?

• The touchpad will generally behave sluggishly from time to time. This seems to be a common problem across touchpads, and it seems to be related to libinput according to other issues I've seen online. Hopefully this will be fixed in future updates; it's not intolerable for now.