@ #8:

I full-heartily disagree with what you say. The reason why you would
want to disable the touchpad is because you have some other means of
interacting with the pointer. Fact of the matter is that some people
(myself included) tend to put their hands on top of the touch pad from
time to time which results in unwanted pointer movement. Since this can
be very annoying these people find other ways of interacting with the
pointer. Personally I use a track-point; others may connect an ordinary
mouse (try counting the number of people using ordinary mouses with
their laptops and you will see that many people really don't like the
touch pad). For these people the touch pad serves no other purpose than
being highly distractive. For this reason it should be possible to
completely disable the touch pad (it might be sensible to warn the user
when doing this, but that is another matter).

As another example think of a blind or visually impaired user that does
not use a mouse at all. Now, remember that even on default installs
focus is actually dependent on the mouse. If you do not allow people to
completely disable the touch pad then the result will be that visually
impaired users will have a mouse moving all over the place, changing
focus with out them knowing (I've seen this happen).

Now you may say, that it is fine just to disable the touch pad when the
user is typing. I disagree. First of all, such measures are only
heuristics and will never be perfect all the time. Second of all, the
keyboard serves at least two purposes. One is typing another is wresting
your arms. People have their hand on the keyboard even when they are not
typing, meaning the cursor might move simply because they are resting
their arms.

In summary: I disagree.

-- 
Need an option to disable touchpad completely
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/479878
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