During the last six months I've been trying to make my laptop touchpad work. I've tried a dozen Linux distros and a lot of detection utilities. But the touchpad was not detected. In the quest of distros, recently I arrived at Arch, but postponed the touchpad problem resolution a bit till today I began by reading the Arch wiki, which took me to this page. Here you can see it is advised to use one or more of the kernel parameters i8042.noloop i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.reset. I began with one at a time, next watching the output of 'libinput list-devices' until when testing with nopnp the touchpad, to my astonishment, was listed. First thing was starting the GUI... and the touchpad was working finely!

I did looked for the meaning of these parameters but only found a reference to i8042.nomux, which seems to apply when the hardware is old. Kernel parameters do not have a big resonance at the Internet.