I’ve been having a serious issue with phantom clicks on a laptop, to a point is nearly impossible to work on a desktop.
At first I assumed it was something related with a bluetooth daemon call that kept returning an error on startup. I forced access to a CLI and managed to uninstall the bluez package but the issue persisted.
I assumed then it was an issue with the mouse itself but after unplugging it completely, using the touchpad had the same behaviour. I also tried tweaking the mouse settings, to no difference.
Finally, I tried booting into Windows, as this machine has a dual boot, and there both mouse and touchpad report no erratic bahaviour.
After a few online searches, I found similar issues reported but back in 2014, mostly related with kernel drivers, which by now must be solved, as the system initially didn’t had this issue, with a fresh install.
The only non-repo app the system has is Zoom and, again, it didn’t started having this issue when installed.
Can someone spare some advice on this?
My temptation is to just do a fresh install but as I once read somewhere “we don’t do that here”. :)
The distro being run is Mint, on a generic Intel based laptop.
Two things you can do to see if it is software/config related:
Test a live USB of the same Mint version.
Create a new user and log in to that account and test it.
The mouse randomly clicking is noticeable already at the user log in screen, so I’m going to risk creating a new account will retain the strange behaviour.
You did manage to make me think there are two DEs on the machine and, maybe, by some weird event, there is an overlapping conflicting mouse controller.
Booting from a thumb drive is going to be very useful and I thank you for that suggestion. If the latest ISO running live replicates this behaviour, then there is the possibility there is a bug I can report.