Sebastian,

Our initial testing and tuning was among co-workers, friends, family
that we could test on.

So far we haven't gotten any complaints from customers about the 0.5
second delay being too long, although some customers still complain that
they don't feel "Disable while typing" does what it should. So I'm
thinking we should try just a touch longer, maybe 0.6 seconds.

As far as competing platforms, I know OSX does disable the trackpad
briefly after any typing activity. The also do palm detection, but how
effective that is varies a lot by hardware. It doesn't work very well on
current System76 products because the trackpad isn't centered beneath
home row.

Note that with my proposed settings, syndaemon does  still does disable
accidental tap to click. I was just commenting that from my experience
an System76 hardware anyway, I wasn't getting accidental tap to clicks
when I turned off sysdaemon entirely (and turned tap to click on, which
I normally turn off). But obviously that's very hardware specific.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1215463

Title:
  "Disable while typing" should disable cursor movement

Status in One Hundred Papercuts:
  Confirmed
Status in System76:
  Fix Committed
Status in “gnome-settings-daemon” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  On a modern laptop with a large touchpad/clickpad, your palms tend to
  brush the touch surface as you type. The problem is that on Ubuntu,
  this creates an annoying amount of cursor wiggle. Competing platforms
  don't have this problem, so this needs to be improved on Ubuntu.

  Part of the problem is that `xserver-xorg-input-synaptics` driver
  doesn't do effective palm detection (it seems), and part of the
  problem is that `gnome-settings-daemon` launches `syndaemon` such that
  it *never* disables cursor movement.

  Currently syndaemon is launched like this:

    syndaemon -i 1.0 -t -K -R

  The "-t" option tells syndaemon to never block cursor movement. It
  will only block accidental vertical scrolling (which is darn near
  impossible to do on a modern system with two finger scrolling), and
  block accidental tap-to-click (which seems unlikely something you can
  do by mistake with your palms). So from a user perspective, "Disable
  while typing" currently does nothing.

  I'm proposing that syndaemon instead be launched like this:

    syndaemon -i 0.5 -K -R

  Without the "-t" option, syndaemon will block cursor movement,
  vertical scrolling, and tap-to-click. And the "-i 0.5" means it will
  block it for 500ms (half a second).

  System76 has been shipping a patched `gnome-settings-daemon` (Raring)
  on all our products for the last two months, and we've received no
  support issues about it (if this caused noticeable usability issues,
  I'm confident we'd have heard about it).

  We've also done a lot of testing and tuning on the timeout threshold,
  and 500ms seems like about the sweet spot. It's long enough to be
  decently effective for most typists, but not so long that the user
  will catch the trackpad still disabled when they move from typing back
  to "cursoring" :P

  Note that this isn't a prefect solution, and you really can't do this
  especially well with a static timeout anyway (would be better to be
  dynamic based on typing speed). For slow typists, 500ms often isn't
  long enough. But for now, I feel it's better to find that sweet spot
  where it at least gives some improvement for most users, without
  causing any negative impact for any users.

  I have a Saucy package available for testing here:
  https://launchpad.net/~system76-dev/+archive/daily?field.series_filter=saucy

  And the proposed branch here:
  
https://code.launchpad.net/~jderose/ubuntu/saucy/gnome-settings-daemon/tune-syndaemon2

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
  Package: gnome-settings-daemon 3.6.4-0ubuntu16
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-3.7-generic 3.11.0-rc6
  Uname: Linux 3.11.0-3-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  ApportVersion: 2.12.1-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Thu Aug 22 07:35:33 2013
  MarkForUpload: True
  SourcePackage: gnome-settings-daemon
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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