I have a new installation of openSUSE Leap 15.0 running in a dual boot with WIN 10 on a refurbished Dell Latitude E5430. Everything is running smoothly, except for a small but intolerable problem. The mouse (actually touchpad) pointer sometimes vibrates wildly. This is intermittent, it mostly works normally. I do graphics and need to be able to hit precise pixel coordinates. Will I need to get another driver or is there a quick fix in YaST?
Are you sure that this is not an intermittent hardware issue? Does the jitter not also occur when using Windows?
Another suggestion: Check if you have any touchpad settings available in the BIOS.
FWIW, I note from a quick search online that some older Dell laptop models seem to be notorious for such random touchpad behaviour. Examples…
https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General/Dell-touchpad-causes-cursor-mouse-to-move-select-items-on-its/td-p/3872206
https://www.dell.com/community/Laptops-General/Touchpad-Latitude-e6420/td-p/3869974
A pragmatic option might just be to use an external pointing device for precision work and leave the touchpad disabled.
Thanks for the quick responses. Yes, I have checked the Dell site and also the BIOS controls. The problem doesn’t occur in Windows. It seems to be an intractable hardware problem. I’ll probably add a external mouse…
I’m not a total neophyte with SUSE, I bought the boxed 10.0 and ran a dual boot with XP for years. GIMP runs much faster in Linux than in Windows.
LOL, the random question is “What is the sum of 101 and fifty?” My first answer was “Bacardi”.