u/Spiritual_Set3040

My husband installed Ubuntu on my old Macbook Air for me, an early 2014 model. It's been great! I love it way better than MacOS and way, way better than Windows. However the only issue I am running into is that my keyboard and trackpad are completely inoperable since installing. I was already using an external mouse instead of the trackpad, but I hate having to use an external keyboard, and I did occasionally use the trackpad when I was not at my desk.

We've been trying to figure this out for about a month. I've watched a lot of videos and tried a lot of things since this seems to be a common issue. The problem is I am a TOTAL noob, literally have never had to use code or a terminal in my life, so I've had Claude AI and my husband walking me through most of this. It seems to come down to "creating a custom SSDT (ACPI table override) that manually describes the SPI controller to Linux." Claude's words, and my husband says this is also what he found in this research. However, both Claude and my husband recommended asking reddit before we go that route.

I will copy and paste what Claude & I have done so far, and try to get my husband's help to answer any clarification questions.

• MacBook Air Early 2014, Ubuntu 25.10, kernel 6.17.0-22-generic
• applespi module loads but no SPI keyboard/trackpad devices appear in dmesg
• ls /sys/bus/spi/devices/ shows only spi0.0 (a flash chip, not input devices)
• acpi_osi=Darwin tried, no effect

We also followed a github link which was where we found acpi_osi=Darwin:

https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/issues/65

All of this is Greek to me. Claude has been my main help here, and my husband has just been supplementing his knowledge where he can and allowing me to learn on my own. I appreciate that from him, but now we are both kind of stuck. He is dreading the ACPI table thing, which makes me kind of scared about it too.

Does anyone have any fixes for this issue or recommendations? Please, explain like I'm 5. I have no idea what I am doing.