Disable touchpad in Linux Mint (or any similar distribution) permanently

Question

My buggy touchpad in Linux Mint 20 keeps driving me crazy as it constantly turns of and on again after a few seconds though a mouse is connected. Maybe it is an issue with the mouse USB but as I hate touchpads anyways I simply want to force the touchpad to be always disabled. I tried various approaches like the tools dconf-editor and touchpad-indicator but despite of trying various settings it keeps torturing me (followed the guidelines here: https://vitux.com/how-to-automatically-disable-touchpad-when-mouse-is-connected-to-your-ubuntu-system/).

Is there any way in Linux Mint/Ubuntu to force my touchpad to not being activated (also after startup)? If I want to do something I connect a mouse, period.

Answer 1

lsmod | grep touch

Note that hid_multitouch module … that is possibly what we are looking for.We need to ensure that we got the right module by looking into using modinfo

modinfo hid_multitouch | head

Seems legit, as the description clearly says it’s for HID multitouch panels.We could try to remove this hid_multitouch to see if that disables touchscreen.

modprobe -r hid_multitouch

Now this is still temporary. Next time I restart my laptop, it will load this hid_multitouch module again. To stop this Linux kernel module from auto loading, we need blacklist it. In Kali / Debian / Ubuntu, it’s as simple as creating a new blacklist file in modprobe.d folder with correct module name:

vi /etc/modprobe.d/hid_multitouch.conf

Save the file and reboot, hid_multitouch module will not be loaded next time. You can follow the same process to disable / unload Linux Kernel modules or blacklist Linux Kernel modules.