Comment 547 for bug 550625

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 04:46:30PM -0000, Michal wrote:
> I already remarked here that trackstick sensitivity becomes broken when this ALPS patches get applied. While it was an optional package I was okay with it. However I would disagree about getting the patches obligatorily.
> There was no reaction about it, I could speculate that people using touchpad usually don't care much about trackstick or based on some technical argumentation the developer believes the trackstick sensitivity problem cannot be related to this patch. If I am the vast minority with my Latitude E6410 I would take the time to remove the patched driver during kernel upgrade. Obviously I am very thankful and appreciate all the hard work which Seth devoted to the driver implementation. Just for the moment I would disagree that this patch is ready for mainline.

I did make some adjustments to sensitivity early on based on feedback. I
apologize if I overlooked any subsequent comments. It's not true that
trackstick sensitivity can't be adjusted in the driver, but it is true
that these devices appear to report very different values for the
trackstick once the touchpad is put in absolute mode, which causes the
observed jump in sensitivity.

Just becuase the driver changes have been merged doesn't mean we can't
continue to improve it. The difficulty with the sensitivity is that it's
partly personal preference, and from the comments I've seen I suspect
that it might also vary from machine to machine. On the machines I'm
testing with the sensitivity seems fine, and further reduction of the
sensitivity in the driver actually impairs the ability to make fine
adjustments to the cursor position. Actually it's _less_ sensitive than
when I load the driver with proto=bare. It also seems to respond to
adjusting the Acceleration setting on the Mouse tab of the Mouse and
Touchpad settings. Have you tried this?