Improve XPS 13 Developer Edition touchpad palm rejection while typing on Ubuntu

Dell + Ubuntu = Goodness :)

I just recently picked up a brand new XPS 13 Dev Edition, which is running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. So far I’m liking it, but there are a couple things I needed to change to make it more enjoyable to use.

The touchpad seems to not have palm rejection going on at all during the typing process

One of the big ones is the touchpad seems to not have any palm rejecting going on at all. Because of the small form factor of the system you are going to hit the touchpad almost every-time you go to type, usually shifting your focus onto a different window or moving your cursor down to the bottom of a file you are writing in, it’s really frustrating. The issue here seems to be driver related.

Syndaemon is getting confused by the other touchpad driver.

In order to improve the palm rejection, we need to disable the generic driver and let Syndaemon do it’s thing — you’ll want to add this snippet:

To here:

 /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-synaptics-quirks.conf

Then you can restart xorg with

sudo systemctl restart lightdm

This should make typing much more enjoyable. Still doesn’t fix the fact that the keyboard doesn’t have much tactile feedback and It seems to hold caps one letter too long. But it should fix the palm rejection issues by disabling the generic drivers while you type!