Touchpad Tapping and Natural Scrolling Not Working In Debian Bookworm

Overview

I have just upgraded my Debian Buster to Bookworm on my old Dell Latitude laptop. Everything went great, but I encountered an issue with the touchpad. Tapping and natural scrolling didn't work. So, here's the story of how I fixed this problem.

GNOME Settings

The touchpad settings in the GNOME Settings didn't seem to be working. Despite changing the Touchpad option to off, I could still use the touchpad and move the cursor. Furthermore, toggling the Natural Scrolling or Tap to Click option had no effect whatsoever:

Checking the Touchpad Type

My laptop has an ALPS touchpad:

$ egrep -i 'synap|alps|etps|elan' /proc/bus/input/devices
N: Name="AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"

Alternatively, we can also list all the input devices:

$ xinput list
...
⎜   ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint     id=14    [slave  pointer  (2)]
...

Updating X11 Touchpad Driver Config

Since my Debian was running X11:

$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
x11

the Internet told me that I just needed to update the X11 touchpad driver config and add two new key-value options: Tapping and NaturalScrolling.

So, that's what I did:

$ sudo vi /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf

I added the two options in this particular section:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "Tapping" "true"
        Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
EndSection

And finally, logged out.

But didn't work. So I restarted the system.

Unfortunately, still didn't work.

Adding a New X11 Config File for Touchpad

After browsing furthermore, and also asking chatGPT, it was suggested that I needed to create a new file in this directory /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d:

sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-touchpad.conf

and pasted this config snippet from /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad"
    Driver "libinput"
    MatchIsTouchpad "on"
    Option "Tapping" "true"
    Option "NaturalScrolling" "true"
EndSection

After saving the file, I restarted my system. And voila! My touchpad finally started functioning correctly.

Moreover, all those changes also had an impact on the GNOME Settings, resulting in the Touchpad section now working as intended. Both Tap to Click and NaturalScrolling options are now working as expected.

Summary

Upgrading Debian Buster to Bookworm caused my touchpad not to be able to tap click and scroll naturally. However, updating, or creating a new X11 config file for the touchpad resolved this problem.