Lately (almost five days ago), I upgraded my desktop from Ubuntu 21.10 to 22.04. As soon as I started using the new version of Ubuntu, I noticed that from time to time (i.e., during heavy keyboard use, a few times in an hour):
- the cursor moves to other random locations in the document (as if the arrow or PgUp/PgDn keys were pressed);
- new tabs are opened randomly in browser (as if Ctrl+T was pressed);
- switches to other application windows (as if Ctrl+Tab, Alt+Tab, or something similar was pressed);
- cursor skips to other cells in a Calc sheet (and sometimes deletes or updates other cells);
- even the GNOME terminal screen was maximized once.
This is rather annoying, since I haven't experienced such a thing during my 3+ years of Ubuntu usage on that same hardware (a decent notebook with 6 core i7-8750H, 24GB RAM, SSD for boot and home filesystem) and all recent Ubuntu versions (18.10, 19.04, 19.10, 20.04, 20.10, 21.04, and 21.10).
I am using standard GNOME version (no Wayland) with, NVIDIA (version 510) proprietary driver.
USB mouse and touchpad seem to work OK.
Q: Is there anybody else experiencing similar problems in Ubuntu 22.04? How can I narrow down the cause of the problem?
Please note that, this annoying behavior occurs completely random and I cannot reproduce the problem whenever I want to.
4 May 2022 Update:
I tested with Live USB Ubuntu 22.04 session for more than one hour. This strange behavior does not seem to occur there during the short test I made. Note however that the Live session does not use NVIDIA graphics, but the internal graphics card with the "NV137 / Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 630 (CFL GT2)" driver.
4 June 2022 Update:
Under Settings → Accessibility nothing non-standard is selected.
dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configurationand re-installation ofxserver-xorg-input-alldo not seem to help.
⚠️ However, it seems that my notebook's touchpad is "hyper" sensitive and it registers click commands just when my hands and fingers are over the keyboard, but at least 1 cm away from the touchpad. In my opinion this is the cause and I am testing this right now.
Problem:
I remember, in previous versions of Ubuntu, I was disabling the touchpad, because I was not using it normally (except in very rare cases when my USB mouse was having a problem).
Now, in version 42 of GNOME, the options under Settings → Mouse & Keyboard → Touchpad have no effect and I have to disable the touchpad from command line.
The command synclient Touchpadoff=1 disables the touchpad with one exception: Even though the touchpad stops moving the pointer and taps also are disabled, the touchpad still responds to physical clicks on it.
$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ A4Tech USB Mouse id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ UNIW0001:00 093A:0003 Mouse id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ UNIW0001:00 093A:0003 Touchpad id=14 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ HD Webcam: HD Webcam id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=15 [slave keyboard (3)]
After looking at the above output, I tried and found out that xinput --disable 14 is also needed to disable the touchpad completely.
So, the question that remains is this:
Why the GNOME options under Settings → Mouse & Keyboard → Touchpad do not work?
Note: It seems that this problem is present in X11, but not in Wayland. However, I have to use X11, because Wayland has many other problems. As another note: I just tested with a "Live ISO" session, and although it runs under X11 too, it does not exhibit this problem.
