How to Fix Two-Finger Touchpad Scrolling Speed on Bazzite (GNOME Wayland)

I installed Bazzite as my daily driver on a Lenovo L14 laptop I picked up at a local pawn shop. While the experience has been great, I immediately noticed the touchpad scroll speed was far too fast. This is a well-known limitation in GNOME, which lacks the native scroll sensitivity toggles found in KDE Plasma. I’d love to see this become a built-in feature in future GNOME releases, but for now, Bazzite users on Wayland have to handle it manually.

Bazzite is an Atomic Desktop, which means the root file system cannot be modified. It’s called ‘Atomic’ because updates replace the entire operating system in a single swoop. While this makes the system incredibly stable, it also makes it difficult to implement system-level changes — like the one we need to control the touchpad’s scrolling speed.

However, it is possible! I have adapted the steps from this very helpful guide by Rostislav Jadavan: https://rostislavjadavan.com/posts/gnome-wayland-scroll-speed. If you need a tutorial on how to do this on a traditional distribution like Debian, you will find it there.

Step 1: Install Build Tools

Because Bazzite is an Atomic Desktop, the root file system is read-only. We use rpm-ostree to layer the tools we need.

sudo rpm-ostree install meson ninja-build libinput-devel

Note: You must reboot after this command for the tools to become available.

Step 2: Compile the Fix

git clone https://gitlab.com/warningnonpotablewater/libinput-config.git

cd libinput-config

meson setup build

ninja -C build

Step 3: Configuration

This is where the magic happens. We’ll create a config file that GNOME will read on startup.

sudo cp build/libinput-config.so /usr/local/lib/

Create the configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/libinput.conf

Copy and paste the following into the editor:

override-compositor=enabled
scroll-factor=0.3

Note: 1.0 is default. Use a lower number like 0.3 for slower scrolling, or a higher number for faster scrolling.

Save and Exit:

Press Ctrl+X, then “Y”, then Enter.

Link the library:

sudo ldconfig /usr/local/lib

Step 4: The Final Reboot

Reboot the system and you should notice two finger touch-pad scrolling is now a whole lot slower and more controlled. Adjust the scroll-factor to your liking.

Tip: If you want to be sure the fix is active, run this command in your terminal:

grep libinput-config /proc/$(pidof gnome-shell)/maps

If you see a file path in the output, the library is successfully loaded!

grep libinput-config /proc/$(pidof gnome-shell)/maps
7f366735a000-7f366735e000 r-xp 00000000 00:22 193765                     /var/usrlocal/lib/libinput-config.so
7f366735e000-7f3667361000 r--p 00004000 00:22 193765                     /var/usrlocal/lib/libinput-config.so
7f3667361000-7f3667362000 r--p 00006000 00:22 193765                     /var/usrlocal/lib/libinput-config.so
7f3667362000-7f3667363000 rw-p 00007000 00:22 193765                     /var/usrlocal/lib/libinput-config.so

Let me know if you have any questions in the comments.