Continuous cursor movement toward the screen edge makes dock appear/disappear rapidly

[user 76543456789]

I have the dock on the left side of my screen. When I continuously move the cursor along the left edge of the screen the dock can't decide whether to hide or show and starts to jump in and out.

It's a single screen setup, MBP 2015 Retina, and because of that I have "scale for menu and title bars" set to 2 in ubuntu system settings. Therefore my best guess was initially that the culprit was integer rounding errors in subpixel calculations, but it looks to be incorrect. I noticed that the issue only appears when I use the force touch trackpad, and not when I use my logitech usb mouse. I don't know how to provide meaningful info about the trackpad though. All I know is that the speed at which I use the trackpad is key. The slower I move the worse it gets. If I move quickly the behavior is pretty much normal.

Distribution
Ubuntu 16.04, pretty much vanilla

Window manager
The default, compiz I guess...

Version
0.11.1.1555

[user 76543456789 (user-76543456789)]

More info

The problem only seems to occur when the screen edge (left in this case) is the furthest away in a multimonitor setup. I.e. I can make the problem go away by adding another screen whose left edge is even further to the left. (The two screens are otherwise arranged vertically, one on top of the other, just not with aligned left edges)

[Henry J. Douglas (cyberdoug42-deactivatedaccount)]

I'm running Solus (Budgie DE) and the problem affects me. Using plank in the left side and moving the cursor with the touchpad over the edge of the screen where the dock is makes it annoyingly unstable, closing and opening as I move. It happened the same way while I was running Ubuntu MATE.

[Josh Ellithorpe (quest-r)]

Yep I can confirm I also am experiencing this issue with Arch and Cinnamon.

[Toasty (toastyyogurttime)]

I am experiencing this issue in Arch with Xfce. I'm using a single screen and it spazzes out if I put the dock on the left but not when I put it on the bottom.

[Mati (matiszary)]

I have the same issue on Antergos with XFCE when the dock is on the left side.

[user 76543456789 (user-76543456789)]

Oh yes, this old thing. It has been an issue on every distro and hardware I've ever tried it on.

"New, Undecided, Unassigned"

I predict that in just a few years more someone will pop in and ask "Is this still an issue? So much has changed since it was reported". The answer is "I don't know. I use macOS."

[Mati (matiszary)]

I have good and bad news.
The good news is that I managed to find a workaround online.
The bad news is that is causes a different problem.

The solution is to put the following line into /etc/environment : export GDK_CORE_DEVICE_EVENTS=1
Link to the original post: https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?pid=48257

The problem that starts to occur with this solution is the dock crashing when trying to rearrange the icons.

I've also reported a bug with the solution and the bug caused by the solution.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/plank/+bug/1828002
If you struggle with this problem, marking my bug report as "This affects me" would be appreciated. Hopefully, the devs will notice it.

[user 76543456789 (user-76543456789)]

Thanks for sharing the workaround, hopefully it'll help people out there.

Personally though I've long since stopped considering Plank a serious contender as a dock, and I've already moved to macOS since they seem to get the very basics right. I can't wait 7 years for a taskbar to work properly.