After facing for a while the extremely annoying bug that shows itself as

- losing the touchpad vertical scroll functionality after a while

- losing the touchpad sensitivity after some more time, this occurs more and more often during the same session

- ending with both stuck touchpad and keyboard

I managed to figure out a workaround.

I have noticed that there was a line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf under

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”

that stated an auto-dev protocol
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”

Since I knew that xserver-xorg-input-synaptics is almost unmaintained (the latest available version dates July 2007 and is simply a git version, not a stable release), I thought the former maintainer had left some unstable and untested code into the driver.

Thus I simply changed that line leaving ou the -dev

Option “Protocol” “auto”

Now it’s been more than a week I’m not experiencing that issue any more and apart from that nothing has changed as of touchpad functionality. I just wonder what the development code has that the stable one does not in order to make Ubuntu devs choose it for default settings.

The related launchpad bug is https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/34501