the new contact detection defaults are bad

[X2E4VXpZKv]

(atleast for me)

hey, i have a sp5 and this commit kinda borked the touch registration for me. i tought the touchscreen has just started to die, but after looking into it, the new ActivationThreshold and DeactivationThreshold values are just way too high for my device to get consistent touch events. maybe i just have small fingers, or my touchscreen is just less sensitive im just leaving this here so others can maybe find out what caused their touchscreen to stop working, since i for one did not even know about iptsd having a config file before this, and the calibration article on the wiki doesnt even mention these two values.

ok sorry for bothering, have a nice day :)

[otjamin]

I have the same problem on my SP8. Tapping on something is only recognized when tapping hard and swipe gestures are not recognized at all.

Resetting to defaults returns the original behavior.

[Contacts]
ActivationThreshold = 24
DeactivationThreshold = 20
OrientationThresholdMax = 5

EDIT: You need to add this values to your iptsd configuration and restart the service. e.g. /etc/iptsd.d/90-baddefaults.conf and sudo systemctl restart $(sudo iptsd-find-service)

[k4ever]

I have the same problem on my SP8. Tapping on something is only recognized when tapping hard and swipe gestures are not recognized at all.

Resetting to defaults returns the original behavior.

[Contacts]
ActivationThreshold = 24
DeactivationThreshold = 20
OrientationThresholdMax = 5

Thanks! I've been pulling my hair out all week trying to figure out why touch on my SP8 became bad all of a sudden. This fixed it!

[jonas2515]

Same problem on my SP5, I need to really press my finger on the screen for it to register the touches, especially when doing multitouch gestures like the 3 finger swipes in gnome-shell.

[NiklasVoigt]

I have the same problem on my SP8. Tapping on something is only recognized when tapping hard and swipe gestures are not recognized at all.

Resetting to defaults returns the original behavior.

[Contacts]
ActivationThreshold = 24
DeactivationThreshold = 20
OrientationThresholdMax = 5

This also fixes linux-surface/linux-surface#1575 (Surface Pro 6)

[Dani3I]

Surface Pro 7, fedora 41 (kernel 6.12.7-1) - I had many touch interruptions and stylus that imitates touch didn't worked at all. After creating /etc/iptsd.d/90-calibration.conf and pasting

[Contacts]
ActivationThreshold = 24
DeactivationThreshold = 20
OrientationThresholdMax = 5

(actually I am now testing ActivationThreshold = 0) everything started working fine on my SP7.

[maximumcopeland]

Surface Pro 7, fedora 41 (kernel 6.12.7-1) - I had many touch interruptions and stylus that imitates touch didn't worked at all. After creating /etc/iptsd.d/90-calibration.conf and pasting

[Contacts]
ActivationThreshold = 24
DeactivationThreshold = 20
OrientationThresholdMax = 5

(actually I am now testing ActivationThreshold = 0) everything started working fine on my SP7.

~~I could kiss you right now~~ Thank you so much for saving me from the past 48 hours of Linux hell. I tested every flavor distro I could think of on my Surface Pro 5 and they all behaved the same like the original problem.

Even though though the thresholds appear to be already set to the default in /etc/iptsd.conf, it seems both conf files need to be active for it to work in my case. Specifically, creating /etc/iptsd.d/90-calibration.conf and pasting those default values seemed to put my touchscreen to the point where I can now activate touch with a "normal" amount of force.