Ubuntu – Enable horizontal scrolling in Ubuntu

The challenge you are facing is likely caused by the fact that while many touchpads enable horizontal scrolling, they often do not have a large enough area for the scrolling to actually be detected. There used to be a program for changing this value, but I don't think it is supported any longer.

Of course, that is only one possible explanation, and it may just be that your touchpad doesn't support it in the first place, which is more likely the problem.

EDIT: From the information you gave, it would seem that either the driver in Linux is missing support for horizontal scrolling, or it is using the wrong configuration for your hardware. In either case, you should report a bug.

According with this answer, you can enable both two finger scrolling and edge scrolling using the following commands in terminal:

synclient VertEdgeScroll=1
synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1

The problem is that these commands are not persistent after a system restart. To prevent this, let's put them to run at start up.

First, make a new small bash script called scrolling with the following code inside:

#!/bin/bash

synclient VertEdgeScroll=1
synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1

Save it in your ~/bin directory, and don't forget to make it executable using the following command in terminal:

chmod +x ~/bin/scrolling

Second, search for Startup Applications in Dash, and open it:

Then add the script scrolling to run at startup: