Touchpad notchy on new 2021 pinebook pro

[dsimic]

Well it appears that there are a lot of variables here, more than I had counted on.  From what I have seen the keyboard and trackpad firmware may be an issue, along with the laptop I have is about a month old, and may be different firmware or even controller than some from times prior. 

The keyboard controller IC in your PineBook Pro should be the same as in the previous PineBook Pro batches, because no changes to the PineBook Pro schematic have been announced.  As a note, some PineBook Pros from the previous batches had a slightly different keyboard controller IC, but the only difference was the maximum number of writes to the IC's embedded flash.

The keyboard firmware and the touchpad firmware in your PineBook Pro should have been already updated in the factory to the latest publicly available versions.  That's all we know from the official announcements.

But looking at your issue and the description the problem you experience and that which OP Neilcob describes, seem to be exactly what I was seeing.   Also the stock settings for the noise cancellation were exactly what you saw 8 8, and reducing them is what helped. While I haven't yet tried another distro, I hear its easy to throw a stock manjaro KDE on an SD card and give it a go.  That will let you see if the setting/driver/os combo that ships stock will let you change that setting and actually have it do something like it did on my laptop.  If that works then we know it's something on the software side that can hopefully be changed to remedy the issue.  If that doesn't help, then we can assume it's probably on the firmware side, which is a bummer.

I'll try to boot Manjaro + KDE Plasma on my first-batch ISO PineBook Pro, and we'll see what happens when the settings you've described are applied.  I'll also make sure that the keyboard firmware is updated to the latest available community version, and I'll make sure that the touchpad firmware is updated to the latest available proprietary version.  I've been putting that off because of the associated risk of bricking.

I would really love to see a lag-free touchpad as the result.

If there is any info I can provide regarding my settings, firmware, drivers etc. just let me know I'll happily try to dig them up for you.  I can say, other than adjusting the settings mentioned I have not flashed any keyboard or trackpad firmware or anything like that.  My pinebook is mostly bone stock except for a few programs I have installed.

We've been trying to modify the available keyboard firmware updater to only read the keyboard firmware, which would make it possible to compare the firmware images that came with different PineBook Pro batches, or to have a better insight into the keyboards that have been reported as buggy or broken.  However, those attempts haven't been successful so far, which was the result of:

• Very little testing has been performed, because testing a modified updater puts the keyboard controller IC at the risk of becoming bricked.
  
• The keyboard controller IC doesn't seem to be made to allow the firmware to be read, it seems to allow only the firmware update to be performed.
  

It would be very interesting to read the firmware image(s) from your PineBook Pro, so we can actually know what has been flashed in the latest PineBook Pro batch, but I'm afraid that it wouldn't be easily doable.

Edit: Actually, your PineBook Pro can provide us with some interesting information, very easily and with absolutely zero risk.   Could you, please, run the following command on your PineBook Pro and provide the resulting output in your response:

Code:

dmesg | grep -i input

The names of the input devices, visible in the command's output, should allow us to know whether the factory-flashed keyboard firmware in your PineBook Pro is the patched community version or the original proprietary version.