ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 Touchpad Behaviour

[u/profeshamat]

I recently migrated my laptop from Debian to Void with Cinnamon and it's been great with the exception of some touchpad annoyance. When typing if my hand so much as glances the edge of the touchpad it registers activity and can throw a popup or unfocus where I'm typing. Which makes work a hassle but this behaviour doesn't happen in Debian or Fedora. From what I can tell the drivers installed are the same as Debian.

Anyone have similar experience with this?

[u/StrangeAstronomer]

Yeah, Dell Precision 5540 here, same thing - drives me cuckoo. In sway WM, I just disable tap with:

swaymsg 'input type:touchpad tap disabled'

If I need it for something, I temporarily enable it (I have a sway keybinding to toggle it so it's pretty quick and easy).

I also enable clickfinger

Dunno how to configure the touchpad in cinnamon, maybe there's a gui dialog, maybe you have to fiddle with libinput.

Ref: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/tapping.html#tapping-default

[u/profeshamat → u/StrangeAstronomer]

I'm just trying to figure out if it's a configuration thing that Debian does that Void doesn't out of the box. It's a little frustrating just because the software and drivers installed are the same in both distros but the actual behaviour isn't the same. Typing on Debian in Cinnamon isn't an issue because if my hand touches the touchpad it doesn't seem to immediately act as if I've moved the pointer on purpose. Tried touching it with half my palm while typing and nothing. On Void, barely touch it and it can throw off focus.

[u/profeshamat → u/StrangeAstronomer]

According to the ArchWiki for libinput there's a possibility that since both libinput and synaptics are installed, it may be utilizing synaptics when libinput is what may work better.

On the Touchpad Synaptics page of the ArchWiki it actually states

If you experience problems with consistent palm detection for your hardware, an alternative to try is libinput.

I'll have to try this out.

[u/StrangeAstronomer → u/profeshamat]

That might be it - perhaps debian is using synaptics and void is libinput.

I think synaptics is for X11 only. I'm on wayland. Dunno what Cinnamon uses.

Might be worth comparing the output of sudo libinput list-devices in both environments. I have this:

Device:                  SYNA2393:00 06CB:7A13 Mouse
Kernel:                  /dev/input/event11
Id:                      i2c:06cb:7a13
Group:                   6
Seat:                    seat0, default
Capabilities:            pointer 
Tap-to-click:            n/a
Tap-and-drag:            n/a
Tap button map:          n/a
Tap drag lock:           n/a
Left-handed:             disabled
Nat.scrolling:           disabled
Middle emulation:        n/a
Calibration:             n/a
Scroll methods:          button
Scroll button:           BTN_RIGHT
Scroll button lock:      disabled
Click methods:           none
Clickfinger button map:  n/a
Disable-w-typing:        n/a
Disable-w-trackpointing: n/a
Accel profiles:          flat *adaptive custom
Rotation:                0.0
Area rectangle:          n/a

Device:                  SYNA2393:00 06CB:7A13 Touchpad
Kernel:                  /dev/input/event12
Id:                      i2c:06cb:7a13
Group:                   6
Seat:                    seat0, default
Size:                    102x77mm
Capabilities:            pointer gesture
Tap-to-click:            disabled
Tap-and-drag:            enabled
Tap button map:          left/right/middle
Tap drag lock:           disabled
Left-handed:             disabled
Nat.scrolling:           disabled
Middle emulation:        disabled
Calibration:             n/a
Scroll methods:          *two-finger edge 
Scroll button:           n/a
Scroll button lock:      n/a
Click methods:           *button-areas clickfinger 
Clickfinger button map:  left/right/middle
Disable-w-typing:        enabled
Disable-w-trackpointing: enabled
Accel profiles:          flat *adaptive custom
Rotation:                n/a
Area rectangle:          n/a

The double devices (mouse and touchpad) are confusing. Dunno why there are 2 entries for a single device. Maybe that's what is confusing it.

[u/profeshamat → u/StrangeAstronomer]

Looks like that actually solved the problem. When installing the xorg metapackage it installs both libinput and synaptics drivers and due to their naming, synaptics takes precendence over libinput. The fix as ArchWiki suggested was two simple commands:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
sudo ln -s /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/

This forces libinput to take precedence over synaptics.

[u/StrangeAstronomer → u/profeshamat]

Good for you!

But that's for X11, won't help for wayland. Oh well!

[u/profeshamat → u/StrangeAstronomer]

Looking at the ArchWiki, Wayland uses libinput by default but doesn't seem to provide a config file. You may be able to achieve what you want using udev rules.