i have an x1 carbon and i hate it. There is an bug with the trackpoint and mouse pad that makes the pointer drift randomly. I have had my computer back and forth and replaced everything. It still drifts
If it drifts in a single direction in that time, I found it was actually a physical problem and fixed it by cleaning around the trackpoint.
I haven't seen this in software though, I currently have the X1 gen 6. Which do you have? Which bug is it? I'd love to see if there is a way to help.
The only remotely related phenomenon I've seen is after resting on the trackpoint steadily long enough, it learns that to be the new center as it's constantly adapting. So upon finally removing my resting finger, it will drift just long enough for the adaptive centering to update and the drift stops. But that's perfectly normal and very short-lived.
I've always run the trackpoints as PS/2 mice in Linux which is basically the legacy compatibility mode, and I don't use the touchpad. So I'm not running the Synaptics driver at all, and I do remember when I tried using the Synaptics driver on the X250 @ my previous employer it was very frustrating until I got rid of that and got things back in old-fashioned PS/2 mouse emulation mode. I wasn't having problems with drift, it was more click behavior and acceleration curves being very wonky.
But maybe if you're driving things at the Synaptics driver level there's a tighter integration and the OS/driver plays a bigger part in recentering the trackpoint. I'm just speculating here.
They've all been bulletproof used as PS/2 mice.
Instead the firmware takes average value over time and regard that as the current neutral, and if your finger is on it longer than that integration period, the sum of mechanical imperfection, planetary gravity, heat, whatever noise AND weight of your finger all combined becomes a new zero point.
The solution is to lift your finger off of TrackPoint and letting it wander until pointer stops. There’s nothing mechanically wrong or damaging in and around that, again, just how it is. Same as how digital kitchen scales or body weight scales need to calibrate itself upon powerup, except TrackPoint does it on the fly.
My old IBM 600X (1998 era) had this issue, as did my 2013 T430 and my current 2017 T470, although it hasn’t happened for a long time.