Tap to Click not working on Debian 12 Bookworm with Synaptic

[Wayseeker52]

Greetings, and thank you for your time.

I've been using linux for some years now, and I'm pretty good at fishing through forums to find what I need. I've spent a few hours on this, and can't come up with anything.

I run Debian 12, Gnome, Wayland on an HP Pavilion computer. It's been running smoothly for awhile. Then--seemingly randomly--the "Touch to Click" setting on my touchpad does not work. In command line, I determined that I have Synaptic because the command line does not recognize xinput and libinput. Under synclient -l, TapButton1-3 are set to 0 by default. If I use Synclient to reset them: "synclient TapButton1=1", etc. it will reset the settings, but fixing the setting only occasionally actually causes the Tap to Click to work; often fixing the setting changes nothing.

I am confused about what caused this and how to fix it. Ultimately, I care much more about fixing it than I do about understanding it, though understanding is always better, especially when running linux.

Any help would be much appreciated!