OK, I usually use a wireless mouse so I didn’t notice this trackpad issue until today. A single tap on the trackpad acts like a right click instead of a left click, in most cases bringing up a context menu instead of clicking a button or whatever. Now I do use my mouse left handed and 16.04 was configured to swap the buttons at the time of the upgrade, but setting the mouse back to right hand mos\de doesn’t change the trackpad and there is no setting in the touchpad tab of the mouse setting to set this. Is there a config file somewhere I need to hack on?
are you using one or two fingers, two fingers on some trackpads is the same as right clicking while one finger is left clicking
One finger. In the trackpad setting I see that I can set actions for two and three finger taps, but both are set to disabled.
I don’t know other than that you would have to find someone who knows more about such things than I, you could try switching to the older synaptics touchpad controller
i also have this problem, after upgrading today from 16.04 to 18.04. previously, my trackpad was set up so that a single tap on the trackpad functioned like a single mouse click (i.e. to select something, or open something that only needed one click) and a double tap functioned as a double click (i.e. to open a file, select a word or url, etc).
after the upgrade, the trackpad didn't work at all. i restarted again & now it works, but the tap doesn't work at all. the settings don't offer anything for a tap. i tried all the options but nothing makes the tap work.
it must be possible! but how??
Try installing the old trackpad driver so it uses that instead of the new one (libinput):
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
Then reboot to use it
hi, thanks for this. i tried it, but it hasn't helped. here's what happened:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics is already the newest version (1.9.0-1ubuntu1).
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics set to manually installed.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
gir1.2-gmenu-3.0 libgnome-menu-3-0 libqt4-designer libqt4-help
libqt4-scripttools libqt4-svg libqt4-test libqtassistantclient4 python-apt
python-aptdaemon python-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets python-attr python-automat
python-click python-colorama python-constantly python-cups python-debian
python-defer python-dirspec python-httplib2 python-hyperlink
python-incremental python-olefile python-pam python-pil
python-piston-mini-client python-qt4 python-qt4-dbus python-serial
python-sip python-twisted-bin python-vte python-xapian python-zope.interface
python3-blinker python3-jwt python3-oauthlib python3-piston-mini-client
software-center-aptdaemon-plugins
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
so it's installed already - but doesn't seem to be activated? or how do i access it to change the trackpad settings?
i think i've solved it, with this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput
2 Likes
I was just going to say, in that case, try the new touchpad driver, libinput:
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-libinput
It is the default for new 18.04 installations, but upgrades keep the old driver if it was installed. I got your case backwards 
thanks for your help!