So nearly all PC laptops in the past couple years have shipped with touchpads that lack physical buttons–the whole pad is a button.
Being used to Macs, I've encountered an issue with nearly every PC laptop from the last few years: resting your thumb on the bottom of the pad where the buttons used to be produces erratic behavior. The internet is filled with people experiencing the issue without finding a satisfactory resolution:
Disable a section of the mousepad?
Disable touchpad over mouse button areas
Disable buttons area – Asus Elan touchpad
Synaptics Touchpad exclude buttons from touch area
Disable touch pad for mouse button region on new HP pavillion models?
http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/hp-probook-4520s-review/
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/elan-touchpad-any-way-to-disable-certain-area.730285/
Some people manage to fix it in Linux (!!!):
https://askubuntu.com/questions/221664/how-to-tune-touchpad-for-smaller-area
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=198752
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/1026046
Now, every Apply laptop I've ever used does not suffer from this problem; it correctly ignores the thumb when it is resting on the bottom part of the pad.
For those whose answer would be "just don't put your thumb on the pad, duh," you don't know what you're missing. It's an incredibly fast and precise way to position the cursor. The number of Mac users who use external mice because their trackpads seem too slow is very low, compared to PC users (anecdotally).
Does every PC laptop user adjust to their frustrating, defective touch pads or use an external mouse (defeating part of the point of a super-portable computer)?
I simply do not believe that after six years, there is no way to get this highly desirable behavior for PC laptops in 2016. There must be a way to fix this.
Best Answer
I'll answer my own question: it's all in the driver and software. Both can implement thumb-rejection, but one must do it.
In the Windows world, Microsoft Precision Touchpads seem to do a much better job of this than typical Synaptics or Elan touchpads using manufacturer-supplied drivers. Still not as good as Apple trackpads sadly.
In the Linux world, the best results I've found require using
libinputwith the "areas" click method. This defines a line at the bottom of the pad that completely ignored all touches and is used only for clicking. If you don't like the virtual middle-mouse button and your distro doesn't provide an interface for disabling it, put the following in your RC file to turn it into another left-click button:xinput --set-button-map <touchpad id> 1 1 3If using the Synaptics driver, there are more customization options, but it can be trickier to set up. The information in some or all of these links will help: