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I want to preface this by saying that I am completely new to using Ubuntu and Linux in general, so I would very much appreciate thorough yet easy-to-understand answers.

So I decided to get a feel for Ubuntu by using a live USB before I install it, but I quickly encountered this serious problem. Basically, the touchpad stops responding to input approximately 1-2 min after reaching the desktop. At first it works like normal (i.e., I am able to left and right click, and it responds to one- and two-finger inputs) but it completely stops responding after a short time. A USB mouse I have on hand works fine, however.

Notably, this issue is made worse by the fact that I cannot even access the internet either, which is a separate issue I posted about here: Wifi issue on Dell XPS 15 9560 . Understandably, it is difficult to troubleshoot this touchpad issue when you can't access the internet to find solutions.

Thank you for any assistance you can provide

Richard
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I have the same laptop (XPS 15 9560) and had a pretty torrid time getting Linux of any flavour working on it initially however it is working brilliantly now. Initially I fought with getting Solus installed but am now on Ubuntu 18.04 and happy.

I think some of the problems may be firmware related (WIFI issue?) so if you still have Windows installed I'd recommend updating to the latest firmware to see if that helps with the connectivity. I am using BIOS version 1.9.4.

For the touchpad issue I used an external mouse to install, and then after a full update the touchpad worked fine for me. A driver issue fixed in newer versions of the kernel than the installation image uses perhaps?

There is another frustrating issue that I encountered where the laptop hangs on reboot and requires a hard reset. This turns out to be a problem with the nouveau nvidia driver. It may be fixed but I blacklisted the driver during and after the install and only use the integrated Intel graphics. It's a bit of a process involving editing things on boot and from the command line.

Since you are new to Linux & Ubuntu your last (and admittedly not ideal) option might be to wait for the 18.04.1 release where there will be updated installation issues with hopefully much better out of the box support for the laptop.

Robin Edser
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