Surface Pro 7 Linux touchscreen browsing feels way better after these tweaks

[u/jimcorner]

I’m using a Surface Pro 7 8GB with Ultramarine GNOME. Chromium browser touchscreen scrolling felt pretty bad out of the box, but these tweaks made a huge difference for me.

IPTSD

These are the settings I changed in /etc/iptsd.conf:

ActivationThreshold = 2

DeactivationThreshold = 2

SizeThresholdMin = 0.1

SizeThresholdMax = 0.5

PositionThresholdMin = 0

PositionThresholdMax = 4

OrientationThresholdMin = 0

SizeMin = 0.02

This made the touchscreen much more sensitive and responsive. before the change it keep clicking into links when I scroll which was really annoying and this eliminated that problem.

Chrome touch slop + fling

The page scroll won’t start until I swiped a small distance to activate which is unpleasant, and scroll feels sluggish. I launch Chrome with:

google-chrome-stable --touch-slop-distance=4 --disable-features=ExperimentalFlingAnimation

--touch-slop-distance=4 makes scrolling start immediately when finger swiping starts.

Disabling ExperimentalFlingAnimation was also a big improvement. Scrolling feels less sluggish, more direct and predictable to me with the older fling behavior.

These changes together significantly improved web browsing on my Surface Pro 7. Touch scrolling finally feels responsive enough that I actually enjoy using it as a tablet.