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by daguu 3371 days ago
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Better palm detection for trackpads - DESCRIPTION: With the caveat that I realize that you need to support many brands of laptop with different trackpad drivers, this is one of my major pains when using a linux (Ubuntu) laptop vs anything else: after hours and hours (and hours) of googling and struggling, I can still not manage to get reasonable palm detection going on my work laptop (Dell XPS 15). When coding, probably once every 10 minutes my palm is mis-interpreted as a finger swipe and my cursor jumps into some unrelated code. ROLE/AFFILIATION: linux software dev, federal gov't
2 comments

Yes, this is a huge problem for me, too! I'm currently using Fedora, so it seems to cut across distros, but it drives me crazy. After tweaking a bunch of config variables I've got something pretty usable, but it's not ideal and it was a huge pain to get to this point. The same machine running in Windows has a much more pleasant trackpad experience, so it's got to be the software.
I can certainly relate! I always disable the touchpad entirely and use the touchpoint only on my Thinkpad, for this reason.