I have an old Lenovo ThinkPad T450S that is laying around and collecting dust, so I decided to install the latest version of Linux Mint 21 on it to give a new life.

I chose Linux Mint over Ubuntu because Linux Mint is built on Ubuntu LTS and everything works “Out Of The Box”, so it is stable and does not require me to manually install any drivers to make it work.

The installation was smooth and successful, however, I noticed that the touchpad was not responding. I could use it to scroll up and down, but I could not tap it to click. I thought it was a driver issue, but after some research it turned out that the cause was that it was disabled by default in Linux Mint. It is super easy to enable it: go to System Settings, then click Mouse and Touchpad. Click the Touchpad tab and choose “Enabled” in the drop down list. It will take effect immediately.

Now my question is why Linux Mint disables the touchpad by default?