T480s Trackpoint drifts

[Peter Hutterer]

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 04:28:20PM +0800, Kai Hendry wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> I'm an Archlinux user who has a new T480s Thinkpad and unfortunately
> the Trackpoint can (not always or reproducibly) "drift". I hope that
> makes sense!

what exactly is drift in this context? it moves on its own to the edge of
the screen?

> https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=235400
> 
> The trouble is I can't seem to disable the Trackpoint pointer itself,
> but still have the buttons work, which I do use out of habit.

not something we support in libinput directly but you can possibly work
around this by setting the sensitivity ridiculously low. 

As for the drifting, is this something on your device only or a general
issue affecting this class of devices? Try playing around with the knobs in 
/sys/class/input/event18/device/device (replace event18 with your event node number)

> 
> Generally speaking I find the the track point is a bit too fast (and
> imprecise and hence useless) 


run libinput measure trackpoint-range and go from there, it's likely that
you need a custom range for that device. And the speed setting can be
changed, I'm having a hard time believing that at the lowest speed setting
it's still too fast given that it's almost tar-like at that speed on every
device I've tested.

> and the track pad a bit slow.
> For example if I drag my finger across the Trackpad, it's not enough
> to get from one side of the screen to the other.

did you try changing the touchpad speed settings?

Cheers,
   Peter

> I deleted Windows [1] so I don't really have anything to compare to. I
> do know years ago, my old old Thinkpads, the trackpoint did use to be
> a good UX. Now... not so much!
> 
> https://s.natalian.org/2018-03-19/t480s-list-devices.txt
> 
> Many thanks!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFlt7PI0sw8&list=PLiKgVPlhUNuz9k0xIp7PGUV5mmDdTS1vJ&index=2