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The touchpad experience of the Mac is where vertical integration really shines. The touchpad is so good precisely because there are not hundreds of hardware var

The touchpad experience of the Mac is where vertical integration really shines. The touchpad is so good precisely because there are not hundreds of hardware variants to support. Just the one that Apple used in their past X years of MacBooks (so never more than a hand-full). And they make their own OS and drivers. Doing this for all laptops Linux could possibly run on is almost impossible. It’s a shame that touchpad (or laptop) vendors do not see good drivers as a competitive advantage. Sounds like a lot of people would buy a laptop just for its touchpad (though probably not enough to justify investment from manufacturers, so it seems).

tbrock 8y ago
There cannot be THAT many different touch pads or drivers for them out there that this is impossible. I bet there are only three or four types of main brands at most which probably all come from the same factory in China. It’s not like every time a new pc laptop comes out the dell and HP folks say: “Yee haw! Roll up yer sleeves boys, it’s time to write another touchpad driver!” That’s just insanity.
- fbender 8y ago
  Not knowing how any of this works, I think best would be having a driver that translates the raw signals into an intermediate, near-native form, i.e. basically provide a standard range X-Y-Z vector (z for Pointer intensity) with good enough (very high) resolution per touch point. Single-Touch devices will only ever get one touch point, those that have no concept of intensity will have a constant or binary Z value. Those measuring pointer-size can set the Z-value accordingly (that‘s how I think intensity is measured anyway). Then allow per-device configs with (basically) calibration curves. Allow for different kinds of curves (discrete value interpolation, Bezier, you name it). This enables the driver to support a lot of different devices. Bonus points if the driver can tell the firmware about the calibrations (I‘d bet quite a few touchpads have their own logic built-in). Also the driver must support some curve and noise dampening as well as progressive acceleration (basically inflating calibrated numbers with higher speed of moving touch points and rapid succession of the same gesture) and thus also understand some „higher level“ gesture logic, e.g. to properly support the right feeling for touchpad scrolling as Macs do.
cuillevel3 8y ago
It would be enough to have excellent touchpad support on one model (or chipset). We could just buy that one. At least the old Linux users were once used to buy hardware that matches their OS.

tbrock 8y ago

There cannot be THAT many different touch pads or drivers for them out there that this is impossible. I bet there are only three or four types of main brands at most which probably all come from the same factory in China. It’s not like every time a new pc laptop comes out the dell and HP folks say: “Yee haw! Roll up yer sleeves boys, it’s time to write another touchpad driver!” That’s just insanity.

fbender 8y ago
Not knowing how any of this works, I think best would be having a driver that translates the raw signals into an intermediate, near-native form, i.e. basically provide a standard range X-Y-Z vector (z for Pointer intensity) with good enough (very high) resolution per touch point. Single-Touch devices will only ever get one touch point, those that have no concept of intensity will have a constant or binary Z value. Those measuring pointer-size can set the Z-value accordingly (that‘s how I think intensity is measured anyway). Then allow per-device configs with (basically) calibration curves. Allow for different kinds of curves (discrete value interpolation, Bezier, you name it). This enables the driver to support a lot of different devices. Bonus points if the driver can tell the firmware about the calibrations (I‘d bet quite a few touchpads have their own logic built-in). Also the driver must support some curve and noise dampening as well as progressive acceleration (basically inflating calibrated numbers with higher speed of moving touch points and rapid succession of the same gesture) and thus also understand some „higher level“ gesture logic, e.g. to properly support the right feeling for touchpad scrolling as Macs do.

cuillevel3 8y ago

It would be enough to have excellent touchpad support on one model (or chipset). We could just buy that one. At least the old Linux users were once used to buy hardware that matches their OS.