How To Disable your Touch screen in Linux

lupetto3 — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 10:17:12 +0000

One of the beautiful things about Linux is the fact that it helps you breathe new life into old tech, or reduce e-waste by giving laptops and desktops the possibility to stay in use.

For this reason, I ended up needing to find out how to disable the touch screen on my Thinkpad X1. The screen had a small crack in the top right, that made the screen have sporadic touches, and made using it a nightmare. In windows, you could disable the touchscreen in the hardware, but in Linux I had to find out 2-3 ways according to the desktop environment I was using. I don't know who this could help, and for what other reason one would need to disable their touch screen, but here are my findings centralized into one:

Budgie or other DE's still on X11
Budgie was easy, and at the time of this article, it's still using mostly X11.

First you need to find out what your touchscreen device is, so you run:
sudo xinput list

it should spit out something like this:

From this list you can see that the touch screen is item 9 on the list. So you would need to run this command:
xinput disable 9

and done!

The issue here was running this every time you login, but luckily, Budgie, and a few other DE's have a list of "startup applications", and usually you can choose a command to run on startup too. Just add the above script, hit save, and done.

Gnome - Wayland Session
For Gnome, things get a little more complicated, but luckily i was able to find this link of the Zorin Forum that worked well for me, you can read the original guide here. So thanks to user "bon0706" for this solution.

It basically requires making a udev rule, and if you follow the methods from the zorin forum carefully, you'll achieve your goal!

KDE - Wayland Session
This one is the most intuitive one, and only a recent discovery for me, since I've mostly used Gnome and Budgie desktops because those have been my preference. But KDE, in a wayland session, has a simple toggle to turn off your touch screen in the settings of the distro.

And there we have it! I hope this is helpful to someone out there.

DEV Community: lupetto3

How To Disable your Touch screen in Linux