techsupport

I have two wireless mice. One is a really good mouse that served me for years until it got too beat up, and now the scroll wheel doesn't work very well. The other is a newer HP mouse (specifically HP 280 Silent Wireless Mouse, product number 19u64AA) that is a bloody piece of shit and I hate it.

The HP mouse currently has two main issues with it. 1, it doesn't "sleep" or turn itself off after a period of inactivity. It just stays on, even if the usb dongle is disconnected, until the battery just dies on it. 2, it's clicking software/firmware had a fucking stroke or some shit. It only clicks on the active screen; so for example, if I have Firefox open and fullscreen, it will not click on the task bar on the bottom of my screen at all. It won't even register that it's hovering over something down there, it just refuses. That, and the middle click won't work. It's genuinely annoying, because the mouse used to work with no issues. I have no idea what caused this, and my conspiracy theory is that HP just kills mice that are alive for too long, because this is fucking horse shit. I do not recommend this fucking mouse at all for this.

What's funny is, I tried both my previous mouse (the one with the broken scroll wheel), and my desktop's wired mouse, and both worked excellently. No issues at all, unable to replicate the issues experienced by my HP mouse. Crawling through the journalctl logs don't show anything wrong with any of the mice, at least not that my noob ass could tell, and the HP support page for the 280 doesn't have a fucking user manual for it. There just doesn't seem to be one at all, not one I can find at least.

Anyways, /rant. How can I see what's wrong with the 280, or fix what might be wrong with it (or factory reset the mouse, if that's a thing)? Alternatively, how can I fix my other mouse's scroll wheel (Victsing Wireless Mouse model PC106A my beloved)?

Edit: Forgot to mention, on Linux mint 22.1 cinnamon, on an HP laptop oddly enough (you would think HP accessories would work with HP products). if you need any information, journalctl, inxi, my fucking social security number, whatever, lmk.

Edit edit (workaround found): So I reset my laptop, with the mouse still plugged in. Upon reboot, the functionality was still broken, and so was the touch pad. So I took a look at xinput list to see what was going on; my thought process was, maybe there's some interference between the mouse and touch pad. I went through, disabling things one by one to see what it did; a number of the things listed didn't seem to affect anything, but i found my mouse was 8 and my touchpad was 13. When I re-enabled my touch pad, suddenly everything was working as expected. I don't know why. I tried restarting my pc again; same issue, but this time i tried disabling and reenabling my mouse, and then suddenly functionality was restored. In both cases, the order in which xinput displayed things was changed, but they were changed differently both times; I don't know if there's a load order that's reflected in xinput or if it just reads things off as it finds them. Either way, for whatever reason, functionality with the mouse and touchpad have some interference when the mouse is first introduced. Though, the touchpad settings in the system settings doesn't seem to have any effect when the 280 mouse is plugged in; its set to be disabled if there's a mouse, which doesn't happen. I don't know what's causing these issues; disabling and enabling through the terminal seems to be the only workaround. There are other devices on my xinput list, I couldn't tell what each of them did, but disabling/reenabling them doesn't seem to have any effect.

Here's the output of my xinput list if anyone is curious about what I have going on:

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ GTCH7503:00 2A94:D009                   	id=11	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA32D8:00 06CB:CEE7 Touchpad          	id=13	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SYNA32D8:00 06CB:CEE7 Mouse             	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse Consumer Control	id=9	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse       	id=8	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard             	id=5	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                               	id=6	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                            	id=7	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard            	id=14	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Wireless hotkeys                        	id=15	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP WMI hotkeys                          	id=16	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse Consumer Control	id=10	[slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ HP 285M HP 280/285 Wireless Mouse System Control	id=17	[slave  keyboard (3)]```