First, the stock configuration has a horrible touchpad - which shouldn’t matter if you don’t use the touchpad, but the horribleness of it is that the physical buttons that should be on the top of the touchpad, and are on the touchpads of models preceding and following the **40 line, are not there. ( operating-system .... ( services ( append ( list ( service openssh-service-type ) ( service cups-service-type ) ( service nix-service-type ) .... ) %my-desktop-services )) .... ) And found that adding psmouse.proto=imps to the kernel arguments and disabling the touchpad in the stock BIOS solves the “possessed mouse cursor” issue.