Finally solved: Touchpad x/y sensitivity differs with screen aspect ratio!

For the longest time, one of my biggest gripes about Linux in general is that my Synaptics touchpad was more sensitive in the x direction than the y direction. I figured that this was due to having a 16:9 laptop screen, and assumed that the driver scaled to screen aspect ratio by default. This was confirmed when I plugged in an external monitor, and (when the monitors were arranged side-by-side), the cumulative x-dimension was used to calculate the touchpad aspect ratio. This resulted in a much higher sensitivity in the horizontal direction than the vertical direction.

After finding zero helpful information on almost every website, I finally stumbled across a solution here (note that the first answer idiotically suggests that you check the mouse panel under system settings):

Solution for Ubuntu 11.04:
Add the options

Option "VertResolution" "75"
Option "HorizResolution" "75"

To the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

After doing that, mine looks like:

Section "InputClass"
     Identifier "touchpad catchall"
     Driver "synaptics"
     MatchIsTouchpad "on"
     MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
     Option "VertResolution" "75"
     Option "HorizResolution" "75"
EndSection

Now log off and log back in, and it should be fine! 🙂

I’m running Linux Mint 11, and it works just fine for me.

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