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The worst thing about broken touchpads is that they're impossible to turn off in Ubuntu: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1408042/touchpad-cant-be-dis...

There's a button to do so, but it's just been broken for months with no fix other than uninstalling part of the last update. Given that Linux typically has no palm detection, it's really a frustrating experience to use on a laptop.



The palm detection problem surprises me. The toggle has has "just worked" for 15+ years of laptops for me. However, palm detection on many of those laptops was garbage in Windows and equally bad in Linux.

Some distros support rejecting touchpad events for N seconds after the last keystroke. That is 100% software, and sort of works for even the worst touchpads.

Edit: Oh, you mention Ubuntu. I gave up on them a long time ago. Devuan works well if you want old-school Debian. Manjaro works well if you want a stable "modern" desktop environment (like Ubuntu used to provide) with menus for hardware configuration, user session switching, etc.


Weird, I'm running Pop_OS which is a Ubuntu fork and the trackpad button just works (not that I use it at all anyway).




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