Palm Rejection & Scroll Speed

Our Neighbors Asahi Linux Ask Asahi
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Hi folks,

This is more a question to the Asahi Linux development team(s) about the roadmap (or current availability). Are there plans to introduce some measures to control trackpad input like palm rejection? I find that unintended input is registered too frequently.

Also, I’d like to see some way to control the sensitivity of two-finger scrolling on the trackpad. At present, it is far, far too sensitive. Just the slightest gesture scrolls entire pages up/down. It’s a conscious effort to scroll slowly to prevent this.

Many thanks.

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Hi. Are you sure this is Asahi related? I’m only asking because I am experiencing the same behaviors on an Intel MacBook with Fedora Workstation installed (no palm rejection while typing, super-sensitive scrolling).

Interesting enough, scrolling is more of an issue while browsing (Firefox) than, say, in Files (e.g. scrolling /bin).

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The scroll speed is known to be overly fast on Firefox and this is a Firefox-specific issue.

If you do find the overall scrolling to be too fast, you can change the setting in the KDE System Settings under Touchpad (this will affect all apps equally). GNOME, as usual, is allergic to configuration settings and still doesn’t have that one, but there’s nothing we can do about that.

As for palm rejection, that is largely handled by the trackpad firmware and disabled in libinput for Apple machines since it was causing trouble. However, that issue may be obsolete due to other changes, so we could try re-enabling it. Firmware palm rejection seems to be quite sufficient for press-to-click mode but not tap-to-click mode (I’ve only heard complaints about tap-to-click, if you don’t need that you might want to turn it off).

1 Like
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Thanks for the answer. I don’t want to hijack the OP’s post, but I hope these answers help them too.

Regarding palm rejection, the issue is not only with the click activation, but also pointer move, which gives headaches when writing, as the cursor jumps to a previous paragraph and one finds himself writing away in the wrong place. However, the behaviour mentioned above is on a very old (read late-2008) MacBook that was just lying around, so if things have changed with newer firmwares (and/or on Apple sillicon systems), please ignore my message, given that this is an Asahi topic.

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@marcan , Thanks for your reply. Yes, you could be right about it being a Firefox issue. I’ll double-check and report back.

Similarly, palm rejection, I do use tap (to click), but I’ll try disabling it to see if it improves and report back.

Thanks.

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As @marcan said, it’s a long standing issue. You can track development and find different suggestions how to change scroll speed here. I found another hack: you can change virtual size of your touchpad to change scroll speed. Works for me.