I have two wireless mice. One is a really good mouse that served me for years until it got too beat up, and now the scroll wheel doesn’t work very well. The other is a newer HP mouse (specifically HP 280 Silent Wireless Mouse, product number 19u64AA) that is a bloody piece of shit and I hate it.
The HP mouse currently has two main issues with it. 1, it doesn’t “sleep” or turn itself off after a period of inactivity. It just stays on, even if the usb dongle is disconnected, until the battery just dies on it. 2, it’s clicking software/firmware had a fucking stroke or some shit. It only clicks on the active screen; so for example, if I have Firefox open and fullscreen, it will not click on the task bar on the bottom of my screen at all. It won’t even register that it’s hovering over something down there, it just refuses. That, and the middle click won’t work. It’s genuinely annoying, because the mouse used to work with no issues. I have no idea what caused this, and my conspiracy theory is that HP just kills mice that are alive for too long, because this is fucking horse shit. I do not recommend this fucking mouse at all for this.
What’s funny is, I tried both my previous mouse (the one with the broken scroll wheel), and my desktop’s wired mouse, and both worked excellently. No issues at all, unable to replicate the issues experienced by my HP mouse. Crawling through the journalctl logs don’t show anything wrong with any of the mice, at least not that my noob ass could tell, and the HP support page for the 280 doesn’t have a fucking user manual for it. There just doesn’t seem to be one at all, not one I can find at least.
Anyways, /rant. How can I see what’s wrong with the 280, or fix what might be wrong with it (or factory reset the mouse, if that’s a thing)? Alternatively, how can I fix my other mouse’s scroll wheel (Victsing Wireless Mouse model PC106A my beloved)?
Edit: Forgot to mention, on Linux mint 22.1 cinnamon, on an HP laptop oddly enough (you would think HP accessories would work with HP products). if you need any information, journalctl, inxi, my fucking social security number, whatever, lmk.
You’re getting past my experience and into stuff I am half aware of on the periphery. I think you likely have an issue in the boot loader stuff. Like the bootloader initiates all the hardware onto handles that Linux then takes control over. IIRC Linux doesn’t implicitly trust any of this, but instead goes through it discovering what exists and where. Most touch pads on laptops are just an internal USB device, but not all. Some are actual hardware implementations. I had an old work Apple laptop that had a 40-odd-pin ribbon cable connection once – crazy.
It may be a situation where the touch pad is some oddball unique implementation or some hacked workaround specific to your machine. Check for scans of the same on linux-hardware.org and be sure to do a scan of yours too for anyone else. See if anyone has left notes or used other specific kernels. If some odd-ball thing works, it is probably in their scan. Do a GitHub search for the model. Sometimes that turns up something useful. Arch documentation is another. Gentoo has the documentation for all the low level stuff, how it works, and how to implement it in advanced tutorial form. Base Debian is the hardware hackers space. At this level of kernel configuration stuff, all distros are basically the same.
I have a less intrusive but similar issue with a RGB keyboard controller on a laptop that is outside of the kernel in unregistered memory.