When Scrolling Breaks and Zooms

My ThinkBook 16 has been the center of much consternation the latest few months. If the other problems weren’t enough, I have one more to add. This is when scrolling turns into zooming.

History of Problems

I detailed my ongoing problems with the ThinkBook and Linux:

• The Brightness Bug: after suspend, brightness resets to 100%
• The Suspend Freeze: everything locks up when trying to resume from suspend.
• Gnome Thumbnail crashes
• Kernel Panics

I troubleshooted. I distro hopped. I nearly gave up. I installed an old reliable distro again.

Old Faithful

Ubuntu was the distro that turned me to Linux full time. I tinkered with Corel, Mandrake, Red Hat, SUSE, and others in the late 90s and early 2000s. When Warty Warthog dropped and Canonical shipped CDs, I moved over full time. It was still a challenge with ndiswrapper wireless adapter nonsense, but I became a full time Linux user.

Over 20 years later, I have tried many distros with mixed results. I miss the brown Gnome 2 era Ubuntu. It was fast and reliable. The desktop was simple and straightforward. I didn’t deal with multiple package formats though I wished for more self contained packages. I bounced around to try Mint, Fedora Core, PCLinuxOS, and many others, but Ubuntu always pulled me back for being reliable.

When I had all of the above problems, I went back to Ubuntu 25.10. It was really a toss up. Fedora’s quick updates could yield faster solutions while Ubuntu does its own spit shine. Don’t worry, Fedora will get its chance. The brightness bug affected both distros and I want the shiny new things so Mint was temporarily out.

Not So Magnificent Magnifying

This was a new problem for me: webpages would zoom in and out. Scrolling would suddenly switch to magnifying. The first couple times I thought it was me. Maybe my left palm made contact with the touchpad causing it to zoom in. I could still click other tabs. My touchscreen worked. But as long as I tried scrolling, it would zoom in and out wildly.

My ThinkBook 16 G6 ABP came from eBay. It carried a Lenovo warranty for about six months and then an Allstate SquareTrade one year warranty. I know all of this in detail because I have used both warranties. First, the wifi card was misbehaving. Networks would drop like a 2003 cell phone (“Can you hear me?”). The laptop was shipped off to Lenovo twice before the card was replaced. Sure, I could replace a wifi card myself. Its $15 for a reliable Intel unit, but I am a man of principle and there was a warranty. They could and should fix it.

It was smooth sailing for a few months. The Lenovo warranty ran out. Then the touchpad had its own issues. Not the aforementioned scrolling zooming mess. No, the left click stop registering. I registered the problem with Allstate online and went through numerous calls. “Have you reinstalled the driver? Is the area clean? Use alcohol to clean it. Reboot…”

About a week with their service center in November and they replaced the touchpad, keyboard, and surrounding plastic shroud. I didn’t expect all of that but I wasn’t complaining. I once again had my laptop: one that I thought would last me years with a decent Ryzen 5 7530u, two RAM slots, and two NVME 2280 slots. Lots of upgrade options to make it last.

When the scroll to zoom bug started in late December, I thought it was the touchpad. They replaced it and it must be broken. It had to be a malfunction considering the left and right buttons are built in. There was no rhyme or reason to when it would strike.

All of this happened on Ubuntu 25.10. To rule out software issues, I tried Firefox and Chrome to no avail. I installed Fedora 43. I was reminded of how sleek it could be and thought I made a mistake going back to the “Just Works” distro. That was until the scroll zoom bug struck Fedora too.

Nothing was safe anymore!

Dual Booting Saves The Day

With dual NVME SSDs, it is simple to dual boot on this laptop. It probably encourages more distro hopping than is healthy too. I blew the dust off of Windows and gave it a shot. I’m now days into Windows 11 realizing the problem is not the laptop.

That’s not really accurate. It is the laptop. ThinkBooks are not ThinkPads. ThinkBooks sit in an awkward middle ground: more upgradeable than an IdeaPad, but without the Linux friendly firmware and driver attention that ThinkPads, Latitudes, and EliteBooks enjoy.

Since ThinkBooks do not receive the attention that other business class laptops. ThinkPads, Dell Latitudes, and HP Probooks/Elitebooks are popular choices are Linux users. They are used for two or three years in a corporate environment before they are unloaded to places like eBay.

Those manufacturers also certify many laptops for Linux, specifically Ubuntu. Consumer or even prosumer lines like the ThinkBook are not certified for Linux typically. That translates into worse driver support and slower fixes.

Booting into Windows 11 is when I confirmed this was a software problem — not a hardware problem. It also helps I fed my problem into an AI service which explained the zoom scroll was a software problem caused by Wayland and libinput.

The problem appears to be more common on AMD models despite the manufacturer. It is not exclusively a ThinkBook issue. It seems to show up on Asus Zenbooks, Dell Inspirons, and others.

Next Steps

There are potential software fixes for the zoom scroll demon. The simplest fix is to ditch Wayland in favor of X11. I like a gesture based workflow zipping between desktops. That means Wayland or at worse, using Touchegg on X11.

I can keep stacking fixes on top of fixes — brightness patches, touchpad patches, Wayland patches — or I can admit that I’m spending more time fixing Linux than using Linux.

This is when I feel nostalgic. That old Ubuntu with Gnome 2 was dead simple. On a fresh install I installed restricted codecs and was set. Now I’m writing post install guides to fix virtual desktop behavior, file manager sorting, and adding Flatpak to Ubuntu.

I am frustrated with the state of Linux.

Conclusion

My eBay shopping for a replacement laptop is one solution. I could switch to a ThinkPad or go back to a Dell Latitude. I don’t want to spend the money but I do need a working laptop.

I could also go back to Windows 11 full time.

Linux Mint is also an option. The Mint team has been very slow to implement Wayland. The latest 22.3 release defaults to X11.

I really love Linux and I love my laptop. I need them to love each other too.

Suggestions

I’m open to ideas. What would you do?