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Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling
- krunck 3y agoThat logo is just wrong.
- redundantly 3y agoI welcome any and all improvements to touchpads on Linux and Windows systems. Switching from my personal MacBook to my work ThinkPad is like traveling back in time in terms of usability.
- dhosek 3y agoI always thought it was strange that people went through the inconveniences of plugging a mouse into their laptop when there was a trackpad right there until I had to use a Windows system and saw just how bad it was.
- mrweasel 3y agoI have an Apple Magic Trackpad, which I use with my laptop and external monitor. There is no way I'm going to suffer the ergonomic hell that is a laptop for a second longer than I absolutely have to. It's great to be able to take your laptop with you, but it's not a device suited for hours of use. It's also illegal to work on a laptop, without external peripherals and monitor, so you need a pointing device anyway.
- heleninboodler 3y ago> There is no way I'm going to suffer the ergonomic hell that is a laptop for a second longer than I absolutely have to I agree with this, but intentionally choosing a trackpad to put on your desk is just accepting a portion of this hell, in my opinion. The trackpad is an RSI torture device to me, because of the way you have to hold the muscles in the back of your hand tense so all but one finger is a little higher than the others.
- danaris 3y agoOn the flip side, one of my colleagues was overjoyed when Apple released the Magic Trackpad, because it's worlds better for her to use with her arthritis than any kind of mouse she's tried.
- mrweasel 3y agoFor me it's either a trackpad or a trackball. I find that any pain comes from moving my wrist and the Magic Trackpad is large enough that I move my entire arm and not the wrist. It's great that we have options, so that people can pick what works for them. It is a little sad that Apple is pretty much the only option for an "external" trackpad though.
- dhosek 3y agoBack in the 90s I had a 102-key keyboard with a built in trackpad (and dual PS2 connectors to hook up to the PC) that was actually pretty nice—except if I tried using the trackpad when my fingers were damp in which case it was hell. I bought it in anticipation of moving to a laptop (which didn’t actually happen for another 5 years), but it was the first step in my becoming a trackpad aficionado.
- kstrauser 3y agoYou and me both. A friend introduced me to vertical mice. I regretted the purchase for the first hour, then came to kind of like it, and now you couldn’t pry it away from me.
- xtracto 3y agoI just want the integrated touchpad of my Dell Latitude 9330 to work decently. The libinput driver is just crap with this model, to the point that I have to connect an Apple Magic Trackpad, and that works great. Synaptic driver works better for the internal one, but apparently it is old and deprecated and everybody writes that we should not be using that.
- kiwijamo 3y agoWas the Thinkpad running Windows? I find Linux (Debian distro running Wayland) on Thinkpads to be exceptionally good -- on par with (and in fact I would dare say better than) MacOS on Mac hardware.
- jxdxbx 3y agoApple has been perfecting its trackpad software since 1994, and it’s been getting better ever since. By contrast Apple keyboards have gotten worse since 1995 when it discontinued the Apple Extended Keyboard II. We don’t talk about Apple’s mice.
- RIMR 3y agoEh, the multitouch magic mouse is pretty intuitive when you get used to it. Depending on what you do, it could be an excellent daily driver, but it does tend to have some limitations that can make it a non-starter...
- jxdxbx 3y agoI can’t right click on them. I guess you have to raise up your fingers from the left side? I just found that to be a dealbreaker. I’ve had to use them for work and I turn them into one-button mice with scrolling. The scrolling is excellent, I like low-profile mice, and I don’t mind the charger port location. But I need to right click!
- doctor_eval 3y agoThat’s so weird. I love my Magic Mouse for everything except gaming, and I right-click all day long without even thinking about it. I wonder what we do differently?
- Toutouxc 3y agoYes, you have to consciously lift the finger(s) from the left side and only touch the right side when right clicking. Not hard to get used to, but there's definitely some friction if you're coming from a normal mouse.
- brazzledazzle 3y agoI wonder if that's the old magic mouse. I don't think I do that with the newer one but I remember something like that with the original.
- dang 3y agoRelated. Others? Linux Touchpad like MacBook Update: 2022 progress and new poll - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34300973 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34300973 - Jan 2023 (59 comments) Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: Touchpad Gestures Now Shipping - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555822 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555822 - Dec 2021 (419 comments) Linux Touchpad like MacBook: Touchpad gestures land to Qt, Gimp and X server - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27414160 - June 2021 (3 comments) Linux touchpad like a Mac update: Firefox gesture support live in nightly - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102894 - Feb 2021 (16 comments) Q3 Linux touchpad update: Multitouch gesture test packages now ready - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700537 - Oct 2020 (136 comments) Linux Touchpad Like a MacBook update: progress on multitouch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23615218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23615218 - June 2020 (127 comments) Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609 - May 2020 (169 comments) Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080435 - May 2020 (324 comments) Linux touchpad like a MacBook: April 2020 update - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515 - May 2020 (155 comments) Linux touchpad like a Macbook: progress and a call for help - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485178 - March 2019 (212 comments) Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17547817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17547817 - July 2018 (336 comments) Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843720 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16843720 - April 2018 (1 comment)
- al_borland 3y agoWhy does this seem like such a hard problem to solve for everyone that isn’t Apple, when Apple seemingly solved the Trackpad over a decade ago? Is this it? An unknown ROI? >the highly uncertain ROI for trying to align touchpad acceleration has prevented us from proposing a system change to the default Linux settings. I can only speak for myself, but I gave up using trackpads on anything that isn’t a MacBook many years ago. Very occasionally I’ll try them and have always been disappointed. This prevents me from buying any laptop that isn’t a Mac and prevents me from running any OS that isn’t macOS on a laptop. I can’t be the only person who prioritizes the quality and feel of input devices when choosing a system. If this can make or break sales and adoption, it seems like the ROI would be pretty good. Even if we are just talking about Java app, if I’m using an obviously Java app that feels like a clunky Java app, I’ll usually find an alternative app that doesn’t feel horrible to use. I’m glad progress is being made, but I struggle to understand why it’s still a problem at all when it’s been so good for so long with Apple. They even sell Bluetooth trackpads for desktops it’s so good.
- tambourine_man 3y agoI’m also baffled by this, but Apple's trackpads have been really good for much more than a decade. I remember doing Bézier curves on a G3’s trackpad and PC people thought I was a wizard.
- jxdxbx 3y agoThat “ROI” comment stood out. Companies should focus on making quality products without tying everything to ROI. The state of some software on Linux is just embarrassing. No attention to detail. Oh and I’ve been using Linux since I installed Slackware via floppy disks. I have an external Apple touchpad and I got the Boot Camp drivers for it working on my gaming PC. I keep it to the left of my keyboard with my mouse on my right to alternate hands for RSI reasons and because even Windows has a lot of features that work best via trackpad gestures.
- freedomben 3y ago> Companies should focus on making quality products without tying everything to ROI. Unfortunately the companies prone to do that are the ones that go out of business. When you get the huge resources like the tech giants you have that luxury, but as a startup you don't.
- recursive 3y agoWhat exactly is smooth scrolling? Like you press the down arrow, and the scroll is animated instead of instantly snapping down by 50 pixels?
- wildrhythms 3y agoUsing the term 'down arrow' in the context of scrolling already reveals you aren't the target audience for such a feature.
- recursive 3y agoOk, I'm not in the target audience. Fine. I would still like to know what it is.
- givinguflac 3y agoFrom Macrumors: MacBook Pro offers an enhanced multi-touch trackpad supporting inertial scrolling. The feature, already present in similar forms on Apple's iPhone OS devices and the Magic Mouse, allows users to "flick" while scrolling as the trackpad senses the momentum of the gesture and smoothly scrolls through long documents and libraries.
- jxdxbx 3y agoScrolling that exactly matches your fingers and has “realistic” momentum. On a Mac I might scroll through an article by just sort of pushing it the right direction, removing my hand from the trackpad and then tapping to stop it at the right place. It’s very hard to describe these things because so much is muscle memory.
- recursive 3y agoI just tried it on this Windows laptop, and it worked exactly as you described, at least in firefox. I pretty much never use a touchpad though, so I don't think I ever saw that before. If I did though, I can imagine coming to rely on it pretty quickly.
- k8svet 3y agoI remember this project starting. Not one single thing has changed that affects me as a result and I use Linux everywhere, daily. As far as I can tell it's a lot of small, niche work, that is almost completely immaterial to average users. Meanwhile there's no stop scroll events across the ecosystem. The single biggest win that Linux touchpad needs is stop scroll events. I'll bite my tongue on passing more judgement on how this effort has been portrayed over the past few years.
- NoThisIsMe 3y agoThere is stop scroll support in GTK4
- mappu 3y agoIs this something like what Qt `QScrollerProperties::MaximumClickThroughVelocity` controls? It's not exactly an event, but a click-through would stop the scroll immediately.
- iknowstuff 3y agoDepends on what you decided to use I guess. The touchpad experience is neat on gnome on wayland on a macbook/surface.
- k8svet 3y agoRight, I've looked before and happy to be corrected but none of that is the result of this project. In fact, the gestures present in GNOME, today, have been there since before the first blog post in this series.
- circuit10 3y agoThe main thing I think is missing is universal support for kinetic/inertial scrolling, where you can fling your fingers on the touchpad and it keeps going after you stop. It seems to work with GTK but not Qt
- LorenDB 3y agoI would find that incredibly annoying for touchpad inputs. Sure, I can understand kinetic input for touchscreens, but touchpads should be precision inputs, not the sort of thing where accidentally bumping two fingers on the touchpad sends you two pages down.
- viraptor 3y agoIt doesn't have to. That's why there are usually various thresholds when dealing with input devices. Like dead zones in controllers. Ideally you should both have inertial scrolling when you intend it and precise scrolling when you don't.
- snvzz 3y agoI am suffering that ever since I switched to wayland and the newer GTK version that supports it. Turns out, in classic GNOME fashion, there's no setting to disable inertia scroll. And I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It is the same problem with smooth scroll, or as I call it "laggy scroll", which forces me to watch an animation, when I made it clear (by scrolling) that I want to be seeing the scroll destination already. That's why I scrolled in the first place!
- circuit10 3y agoI don't find accidentally triggering it to be a problem, and it's really useful when you need to scroll a long way
- luqtas 3y agoalso a cool extension: https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg https://github.com/JoseExposito/touchegg
- leighleighleigh 3y agoThis fad of using an AI-generated image as the tacky doormat of an otherwise interesting blog post is making me pissed off /uncaffeinated
- asdff 3y agoIf that image is AI generated the text probably is too. We should start flagging these posts. I'm not interested in seeing model output
- carpetfizz 3y agoEspecially when it's a pregnant Tux 0.o
- Hucklederry 3y agoSomewhat relatedly, I hate hate hate clickpads. They are so much slower, unintuitive, and finicky yet every single laptop these days has the useless damn things. I used to be so efficient with touchpads with tactile left and right mouse buttons. Now my modern laptop is practically useless to me without an external mouse, which significantly reduces its flexibility. I have spent days fiddling with utilities in Linux to alter settings to a state where its barely tolerable if I absolutely must use it.
- distantsounds 3y ago2024 is the Year of the Linux Desktop! This _surely_ is a sign we're going to get it, right? Right?
- marcodiego 3y agoWe all know the "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme, but this deserves an answer. I don't think linux will overtake apple on the desktop (which actually includes notebook and laptops) but the current state has been good enough for a few years. And I'm not saying it is good enough only in terms of it being ready or well rounded, I mean in terms of marketshare. Linux has surpassed the 4% mark in globalstats last month and combined with chromeOS (with which it share many drivers) had peaks above 7% last year; it is very likely that the record will be broken this year. Of course, globalstats may be inaccurate, but I guess it is a good picture of the trends. This has had an interesting consequence: it is no longer a good idea to ignore linux on the desktop; at least not for hardware vendors. It's been a long time since I last saw a consolidated laptop with anything not working out of the box. In the software side, linux is still ignored by some big name vendors, namely adobe, microsoft and game studios. That point is still sad. Now, considering most developers software are multiplatform and, besides games, most entertainment runs on the browser, the last obstacle is still software. As linux' usage grows (and although very slow, it grows increasingly faster), vendors will eventually have to change their minds about linux on the desktop. Nevertherless I don't think that will happen before the end of this decade, also I don't think will see linux beating windows or even mac on the desktop. But, since I'm not dependent on any non-multiplatform software, I really don't care: the current situation (even in terms of marketshare and the way it has been continually improving) is good enough for me and has been for some years already.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- palata 3y agoAlso... I don't really want Linux on the Desktop to beat macOS/Windows. Because at that point it will be just like macOS/Windows, and I am not on Linux for that. I often see complaints that Linux on the Desktop is not enough like macOS/Windows, and I never understand: why use Linux then? I want Linux because of what it is now, not because I want a free macOS/Windows.
- marcodiego 3y agoI think windows touchpads have also been improved after windows 10. Just a few years ago you could easily recognize windows user using notebook because they always brought a mouse with them, such bad was the touchpad on windows; actually it was way way worse than on linux. That habit seems to be fading out, so I guess the touchpads have also been improving for windows users recently.
- kiwijamo 3y agoI've recently switched back to Windows 11 from Linux and while it is certaintly better than what it was, is still way behind what Linux has.
- pessimizer 3y agoSeems like calling it "Linux touchpad like MacBook" is a way to make sure that no one will be willing to help you other than people who use MacBooks, and people who use MacBooks have no need for this. I'm into "Linux touchpad with more tweakable and accessible parameters," or "Linux touchpad with better gesture support," but described like this, it's the type of thing I would ignore or not even hear about until it was an abandoned/dead project. I simply wouldn't realize that it's something useful for me to support. I exclusively use touchpads and Linux desktops, and while I've been frustrated at not being able to get the touchpad to feel like I would ideally want, if it felt like a Mac touchpad I would hate it. A bunch of parameters that you can tweak to imitate MacBooks? Yes, please. A switch to turn your touchpad into a Mac touchpad? Who cares other than people who are only forced to use Linux for development on the job because their preferred Mac is too nerfed to allow them to allow them to get their work done? As a larger statement, it seems that the strain of "What will make Linux catch on is making it more like Macs" has largely died off, largely because the people who want Macs buy Macs. It's a tactic as likely to be as successful as the "making Firefox indistinguishable from Chrome will make Chrome users switch to Firefox" pretense, and gets as much development support as the "making GIMP exactly like Photoshop" projects. The Firefox thing wouldn't have happened if they weren't completely funded by Google, and people who like Photoshop prefer Photoshop and aren't going to work on GIMP.
- LorenDB 3y agoI'm confused what this is trying to achieve. In my four years of Linux usage, I have had no complaints about the touchpad[0]. [0] Other than the issue where sometimes my touchpad requires an extra finger touch to work after resuming from suspend, but I have a hunch that is a hardware/firmware issue. In fact, I seem to recall that happening on a Windows machine once.
- dylan-m 3y agoI find this project really confusing, as well. I'm sure sure this project is doing some good work, but I'd love if they take the time to catch us up a little bit, or maybe tweak their name to better reflect what it is they're actually doing. Like, for a modern Linux desktop on well supported modern hardware, what is this affecting? From my perspective as someone who is rather picky about pixel perfect scrolling and animations, and happily using GNOME 45 with a Magic Touchpad, a Logitech mouse, and a Thinkpad touchpad, and finding nothing particularly amiss with any of those[0] … I'm, um, lost. Is this all about backporting things to X11? I'm unfamiliar with how touchpads are over there nowadays. (Frankly that sounds like a waste of time to me, but if it still makes people happy, that's cool). Or has this project been actively contributing to exactly those things I'm using, and I just didn't realize? [0] The Magic Touchpad is definitely a better experience than the Thinkpad one, but they both support multi-finger gestures, and Gtk apps correctly do pixel-perfect scrolling with kinetics and all that jazz. Could maybe do a better job doing the right thing when I lift my finger after scrolling at low speeds. If I used more apps with different toolkits, I know I'd be annoyed by the differences in behaviour between them, so there's definitely something missing there. Happily, since somewhat recently, pretty much every app I use supportsGtk 4 apps all support pixel-perfect scrolling with smooth scroll wheels, too, which is pretty cool.
- yoavm 3y agoSame here. ThinkPad user for years, never had any issues. Whenever I help a friend with a MacBook I often feel like I cannot control the touchpad and so I ask the friend to do the clicking. I think the whole story here is people moving from Apple to Linux and wanting things to feel exactly the same.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
- johnthuss 3y ago> We now have smooth scrolling support in popular Java library called "awt." Many Java applications use this library underneath, including IDEs such as Eclipse, IDEA or Rider. Eclipse doesn't use AWT, but rather uses SWT, a completely separate toolkit/API. That said, it's still great to hear that this is being improved.
- cbsmith 3y agoThat whole section made me squarely. It feels like it is written by someone who doesn't know Java.
- glitchc 3y agoIt's hard to guarantee a consistent experience given the large variation of hardware out there. Apple has the advantage of vertical integration, allowing them to optimally tune their drivers for a single device.
- notso411 3y ago[dead]
- sublinear 3y agoI grew up a PC gamer in the 2000s, so developed a very strong preference for no acceleration at all and a medium-low pointer speed. Apple may have great trackpad hardware, but all the software smoothing/acceleration/inertia is infuriating when trying to make precise cursor movements. I find myself constantly overcorrecting. These fractions of a second wasted add up in a day while trying to work. It's exhausting. Windows is even worse and I don't believe it's possible to completely get rid of the acceleration. All these skeuomorphic attempts to apply physics to the UI are misguided. Why not bring back those old ugly icons and the wasted screen space too?
- zx8080 3y ago> at the moment, our lead developer is working on Linux touchpad improvements at less than 1/8 capacity. This means that progress is slow as he can only spend half a week per month on improvements. How does it work? For most engineers, working on some complex task with this kind of scattered schedule means a need to spend the significant time on restoring the context.
- lagt_t 3y agoWho doesn't carry a wireless mouse? Or just hotkey your way through. Anything in between seems like a huge drop in QoL.
- wodenokoto 3y agoMaybe this will allow mouse to scroll like a trackpad? That would be nice. Particularly spreadsheets with tall cells can be almost impossible to scroll with a mouse because mouse scrolling is on lines and you need half lines to comfortably view what’s at the bottom of a tall cell. But use the track pad and it’s fine.
- rmbyrro 3y agoIs there an initiative going on to make hibernation work on Linux? I think this is a much higher priority... Honestly, this is the only thing that bothers me about Linux. I need to keep my machine suspended between use sessions, which is a waste of the planet's resources. Imagine that multiplied by the dozens (maybe 100's?) of thousands of engineers doing the same?
- cl3misch 3y agoI have always been bewildered about the demand for suspend-to-disk (aka. hibernation). Suspend-to-RAM (aka. standby) consumes virtually no energy, doesn't create disk writes, and wakeup is instant. The desire for hibernation seems to be constant and widespread though. Honest question, what do you expect from hibernation that you don't get from standby?
- orangeboats 3y agoBack then (10 years ago?) standby consumed energy, if you left your laptop on standby mode for far too long you'd come back to see the battery dead and you lose all your work. So hibernation was by far the best option to maintain a long-running desktop session. But these days standby mode consumes so little energy that hibernation is no longer needed in my honest opinion. Still the mindset remains.
- cl3misch 3y agoThe touchpad experience on Gnome is largely great already. It has kinetic scroll and gestures. My only gripe is that you can't control the scroll speed. Especially in Firefox it feels way to fast. There are config options for that, but they also apply to a mouse scrollwheel, which in turn will feel too slow. I guess the lack of this setting on the OS level is caused by the ongoing discussion what the "correct" place for advanced touchpad settings would be (application/compositor/libinput), which has been mentioned in multiple comments here.
- albertzeyer 3y agoIf you want to have mouse scroll wheel acceleration, you might be interested in a small project of mine: https://github.com/albertz/mouse-scroll-wheel-acceleration-userspace https://github.com/albertz/mouse-scroll-wheel-acceleration-u... I'm using this all the time on non-Mac platforms. Once you get used to this, it's hard to get back. But I'm still waiting that such a feature gets more built into the core, e.g. libinput or so.
- cweiske2 3y agoHow can I test the improvements? Wayland, XServer, Firefox, Gtk and QT patches were merged in 2021 already: https://bill.harding.blog/2021/06/06/linux-touchpad-like-macbook-update-touchpad-gestures-land-to-qt-gimp-and-x-server/ https://bill.harding.blog/2021/06/06/linux-touchpad-like-mac... But while running a current Debian unstable with Mate desktop, I don't know in which applications I could test the gestures, neither do I know which gestures are supported