Well pain me green and call me a pickle, this is one of the funniest shit I’ve seen with tech (apart from the 500 mile email): my laptop sometimes “forgets” that 1 finger mode (to simply move the cursor) exists, and I need an extra finger for everything: 2 fingers to move the cursor, 3 fingers to scroll, 4 fingers to middle click, etc.
Well, as it turns out, it’s an issue with my filthy greasy fingers (I have a lot of coconut oil on them lately, as i’m trying to rehydrate my skin after 10 days in the 23% humidity aridity of Budapest): 1 greasy finger does not conduct enough, so Wayland does not register it as “touch”. 2 fingers however are OK — for 1 finger’s worth of “touch”. 3 fingers conduct enough for 2 fingers, and so on. Suspend an unsuspend solves the issue by the way (so does apparently anything else that resets the touchpad subsystem/driver of Wayland, like switching out to / back from a tty), so there’s a bug-like element to this, but still, how funny is this. (And yes, I’m thinking if I clean my touchpad it’ll resolve the issue for a long time.)