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4 Posts
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[Tiger Lake|DELL|Inspiron] Touchpad: Cursor temporarily drops acceleration and increases inertia for small movements on Linux
Hello to anyone out there reading this.
I would like to report a serious touchpad issue that several DELL users have been experiencing lately on Linux.
The best way to describe it is a temporary feeling of stickiness, during which no matter how hard you move your finger on the touchpad surface, it would hardly move at all, making you feel a simple movement like a herculean effort.
This is affecting Inspiron as well as XPS (as reported by other users), but I'm reporting it here since I own an Inspiron myself (Inspiron 13 5310).
The thing we all seem to have in common is the newest Tiger Lake CPUs.
This is only happening on Linux (several distros: Kubuntu, openSuse, Arch/Manjaro, ...).
I, and other users, have reported this issue in the libinput project issue tracker. libinput is basically the lib handling all user input devices on Linux.
According to libinput maintainers, there is nothing strange in our bugreports that could point at some issue with libinput itself. I wonder if this issue is lower level, and caused by the Linux kernel not playing nicely with whatever touchpad hardware DELL is fitting in these recent Inspiron/XPS models.
If someone at DELL has a chance to test this, please use one of these models with a Tiger Lake CPU, install a recent Linux OS among those mentioned above, and see if you can reproduce the issue, it should be rather easy.
Reports on the libinput project for further info can be found here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/618
and here
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/636
I saw also a report of this issue on reddit, here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/ofbzg3/dell_xps_15_9510_experience/h5ddy07/
and here my reply and mini-thread:
This issue is spoiling the experience of using an otherwise great piece of HW for several people of the Linux community.
While I understand that DELL seems to officially support only Windows for my specific model, I am not sure the same is true for the more expensive XPS product line, not to mention the fact that DELL has otherwise a historically very good relationship with Linux support in general - a reputation I hope you will be able to live up to in this circumstance.
Thanks a lot in advance.
lucasankit
3 Posts
1
August 27th, 2021 06:00
Thx Andrea, for reporting this issue. I'm having the same problem with my new XPS 9510 model. I've tried Ubuntu 20.04 (HWE 5.11 kernel) and Ubuntu 21.04; both gives the same issue with the trackpad.
With Windows 10, I have no issue.
So, for a time being, I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 with external mouse.
andrea.ippo
4 Posts
0
August 27th, 2021 07:00
Hello @lucasankit , thanks for your feedback.
I'm also doing that but that's definitely less than ideal
Feel free to track the issue also on the libinput project issue tracker (see link #618 above).
Magillos
2 Posts
0
November 3rd, 2021 13:00
I have a similar issue with Dell Inspiron 5515 laptop with AMD processor bur somehow I doubt that issue is platform related. I tried many, many potential solutions with no luck.
Right now experimenting with all dell modules (dell_smm_hwmon dell_rbtn dell_laptop dell_wmi dell_smbios dell_wmi_descriptor) blacklisted and so far so good. It's a second day going without the issue occuring. The only very minor downside I noticed is that the keyboard backlit adjustment is gone from Plasma battery applet. If you happen to use smbios to tinker your BIOS settings you will not be able to; not an issue for me as Dell, very regretfully, decided to not support that functionality on Inspiron series.
abduss
2 Posts
0
November 11th, 2021 06:00
I have a similar problem with my xps 9510 on Elementary os.
I'm really disgusted by the fact that we can't even use linux properly. Why are DELL taking so long to react? Could there be a hardware problem? We don't know.
Thank's @andrea.ippo for reporting this issue.
andrea.ippo
4 Posts
1
November 11th, 2021 07:00
No problem
Since I'm not following the DELL forum a lot, a word of warning to whoever may stumble upon this thread: discussion around this issue is currently hosted on the libinput issue mentioned above. Please refer to that one for any news and comment there to provide feedback. DELL definitely doesn't care enough to investigate this.
Jpp59
6 Posts
0
June 27th, 2022 18:00
I had the same issue on my inspiron 15 5510. I fixed the issue by soldering a wire in the back of the touchpad, it was a grounding issue. the issue was strangely less on windows than on linux, but since the soldering, touchpad is perfect under windows and linux.
Here a video showing how to do it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xGq5gmKEAA