Atrocious tap-to-click responsiveness in Ubuntu

Recently I was forced to use my laptop’s touchpad instead of a mouse. Scrolling and clicking via touchpad buttons were fine, but tapping to click was incredibly inconsistent and frustrating. Most of the time I needed to tap more than once, with varying amounts of force and speed, before my clicks would register. I initially thought it was a problem with my antiquated laptop’s touchpad and lived with it for days, until I booted into Windows 7 and found out that Windows registered my taps almost perfectly. I’d been so frustrated that the relief of having responsive tap-to-clicks was overwhelming (my girlfriend had to ask me what I was thanking God out loud for).

As it is I’m rather clueless as to how to begin troubleshooting and solving this issue. Help appreciated.

 

You could try gpointing-device-settings, or the older gsynaptics which, while officially labeled as deprecated, solved my problems with my touchpad's sensitivity. Both are in the repos.

 

I tried gpointing-device-settings first, since the summary mentioned it was the successor to gsynaptics, but it seemed to do nothing. gsynaptics itself, however, has produced a noticeable improvement.

Thanks for the suggestions.

 

gpointing-device-settings worked well for me, but there is an annoying bug where it would lose your settings after a reboot. Actually, I hate touchpads and have a mini usb mouse for my laptop.