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Comment by eth0up | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux, is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness" sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the wiki for Unethical Human Experimentation. Of course, Linux is not entirely to blame; the physical quality has declined immensely for most touch/clickpads.

Perhaps someday I'll experience playing go without a mouse and risk of hypertension.

I'm typically not one to use the term - but godspeed, in this case!

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> My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers.

Under which circumstances is disabling it on a software level insufficient?

An emotional one.

I like your honest answer.

I can't stand laptop touchpads on any OS (except Apple trackpads, which I admit are usable, but I don't own a macbook so this point is moot). I can't stand most laptop keyboards either. I use an external keyboard and mouse in every laptop, making them effectively "portable computers".

Now there's something you don't see every day.

I love this and your subsequent responses. I want to share one of my own.

A few years back -- so I cannot blame the pandemic -- I was fed up with my old Dell XPS. It was originally a pretty awesome laptop, but it was reaching the end of its useful life and it had many quirks. One was a key that was acting weird. In a fit of rage -- and I trust you'll understand me -- I decided to remove the key to see what was the deal, and proceeded to disassemble the whole laptop to do so, tugging at cables, forcing the case, twisting things out of the way. Because YouTube tutorials weren't clear enough, I ended up destroying the laptop. I didn't even find the reason the key was acting up.

With the laptop re-assembled but clearly beat up, parts of it destroyed, my wife arrived, took a look and said:

"You know you could have removed the key without dismantling the laptop, right?" and proceeded to show me how. In my rage I hadn't even considered this.

I wanted to buy a new laptop, anyway!

My ThinkPad has two sets of buttons - one with a middle mouse button below the spacebar, and one with just left and right click below the trackpad that practically hangs off the bezel.

Fortunately, the trackpad flex cable only connects to the bottom pair of buttons, so unplugging the flex cable is a completely non-destructive process that leaves the trackpoint and mouse buttons completely functional and makes my laptop somewhat secure against other people trying to use it! I will admit that this non-destructive method lacks the catharsis that pliers could provide.

By the way, modern touchpads support HID feature reports to disable surface and buttons. Usages 0x57 / 0x58 in the Digitizer page. The Linux driver is aware of those but uses them only to ensure that everything is turned on. I think that it really should expose an interface for a user to control those bits.

Have you considered (if you’re in a position to) purchasing a tablet to use as an oversized trackpad? My Wacom has come in a handy a few times I didn’t want to use the pen and I forgot my mouse somewhere (my laptop trackpad is not great).

I've set easy keyboard shortcuts to enable/disable the touchpad, and that has been working for me. But I understand how you feel, the palm rejection is especially terrible, no matter how I try to tweak it.

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