Palm detection not working

Sorry in advance if I am posting this in the wrong place. The community support category seems to push linux issues to this subcategory, and the keyboard-touchpad tag is only for the community support category, so I’m not sure where it should start.

Which Linux distro are you using?

Ubuntu

Which release version?
(if rolling release without a release version, skip this question)

24.04.3 LTS

(If rolling release, last date updated?)

Which kernel are you using?

6.17.0-20-generic

Which BIOS version are you using?

26.96.0

Which Framework Laptop 13 model are you using? (AMD Ryzen™ AI 300 Series, AMD Ryzen™ 7040 Series, Intel® Core™ Ultra Series 1, 13th Gen Intel® Core™ , 12th Gen Intel® Core™, 11th Gen Intel® Core™)

Framework Laptop 13 AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 w/ Radeon 860M

Issue:

I’m having real problems with palm detection. After doing some initial troubleshooting, it looks like the issue may be that the touchpad is not providing the information needed to trigger it?

The PIXA3854 driver does not appear to expose contact size or pressure data to the kernel — ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR is absent from the device’s axis list, as shown by evtest.

libinput list-devices confirms no palm detection capability:

Capabilities: pointer gesture

libinput measure touch-size /dev/input/event7 confirms:

This device does not have the capabilities for size-based touch detection.
Details: Device does not have ABS_MT_TOUCH_MAJOR

As a result, none of the following help:

  • AttrPalmSizeThreshold / AttrThumbSizeThreshold in local-overrides.quirks
  • AttrPalmPressureThreshold / AttrThumbPressureThreshold
  • AttrSizeHint

Disable-w-typing is enabled and helps during typing, but does not catch thumb contact during pauses.

Is there anything else that I can do? Am I approaching this problem incorrectly? The fact that the forum is not awash in issues related to this suggests to me that it is a me thing. I just can’t figure out what that me thing might be.

thank you

2 Likes

Did you mean palm rejection? It’s been frustrating for me, on Fedora 43/GNOME.

The best bandaid fix I have found so far is auto-disabling trackpad input any time it detects an external mouse, and using that instead for mouse input. This command should work on Ubuntu as well:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events disabled-on-external-mouse
To undo the setting: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events enabled

Yes. Thank you for this, and also ugh that it is the best solution out there. I don’t understand how framework could decide to ship a trackpad that just doesn’t support this feature on linux.

Palm rejection has been an issue with running Linux on laptops for ages, well before Framework existed, so I wouldn’t necessarily put blame on them. Palm rejection on a Framework works just fine on Windows. Driver support on Linux for touchpads has historically been lackluster.