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I have a Dell E6530 with an Alps touchpad, NVIDIA NVS 5200 with proprietary nvidia-319.32 video driver installed.

I am using xfce4 although I do not know if this makes a difference, as it seems to be a configuration unrelated to the DE/WM.

The touchpad driver in 3.11.0-12-generic works flawlessly on the laptop by itself. nvidia-319 works flawlessly and significantly better than noveau.

However when I plug in an external display and extend to that monitor, my touchpad track speed increases dramatically, and it becomes very hard to make precise mouse movements, especially when moving the cursor relatively long distances, due to the cursor acceleration. It seems to increase the speed proportional to the net increase in total resolution available in the dual monitor setup. Which would seem that the track speed is based on some sort of display resolution percentage, not number of pixels like I had expected.

Does anyone know if this is indeed how the touchpad configuration works? And if there is a way to prevent this, or do I need to go in and decrease my track speed by about half every time I plug in an external monitor?

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    I don't have any solution for this, but I experience the same behavior here. Touchpad speed seems to increase proportionally to display area.
    – Michael Krupp
    Jul 4, 2014 at 8:56

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You're not the only one to experience this and unfortunately there is no fix. Users have reported this behaviour since 2010 and it has been an open bug since 2011.

Having explored the various suggestions in those links, until this bug is fixed, I think the only way is to adjust the speed manually each time

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  • That bug report does say "Better solution is to switch to libinput, since synaptics is in maintenance mode now anyway" - how comes that hasn't been done already?
    – Asfand Qazi
    Mar 21, 2017 at 17:01
  • @AsfandYarQazi better to ask this question on the bug report itself
    – hellocatfood
    Mar 21, 2017 at 18:04
  • 7 years later and dual monitors on Ubuntu still doesn't work properly. Unreal. The senseless changing of sensitivity makes the touchpad almost unusable.
    – J23
    May 23, 2021 at 2:57

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