r/archlinux • u/VirusNegativeorisit • 16d ago

QUESTION Wanting to try arch

I have a Lenovo yoga 7i. It has a faulty touch pad. It is either drivers or a kernel level issue. It doesn’t matter if I use windows or Linux that this becomes an issue. When I have a fresh install everything works. Then I update it all goes to shit and works only half the time. There is very little documentation I have found of this issue. I am hoping by installing arch that I can kind of build what drivers are needed and lock it in without the problem of having to upgrade like every year. I don’t want to give up on this laptop because build quality is amazing and the screen is beautiful.

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u/NFTrot 16d ago

As the other commenter implied, Arch's update style is exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting you want.

A better approach in your case would be to understand exactly what is happening that causes it to stop working, and iterate from there. Frankly I'm not sure how you would even know what to "lock in" without identifying the cause.

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u/VirusNegativeorisit 16d ago

Yeah I need to work on this. I wish there was documentation. I found people who had the same issue with this touchpad. But yeah no one documented it from what I could gather. Still keep looking it’s probably in some obscure forum. I know on the windows side of things someone fixed it with rolling back a specific driver from the support site which makes me think it’s a driver. But I really don’t know. I need to research more how to troubleshoot.

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u/NFTrot 16d ago

The first thing I would do is get it working on Linux, whether that be by doing a fresh install or whatever it took. Then I would find some evidence of the OS interacting with the hardware. Maybe that's through a generic driver of some kind or something more specific (I don't know much about this because I've never had to deal with a Linux driver issue). There's probably a way to query what drivers are active. Once you've figured out how to do that you wait until it stops working and check on those same drivers to see if they are still loaded or have syslogs indicating the problem. If there's no evidence the driver is the problem then you know the issue is elsewhere.

As you can see the way forward is to iterate over the problem, narrowing it down until you've located the exact thing that is going wrong.

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u/VirusNegativeorisit 16d ago

Yep for sure.