3 ms·

In a previous post, the author mentions a few benchmarks comparing Mac vs Linux trackpad performance: https://archive.is/s7SZM https://archive.is/s7SZM 1. Linu

by danso 7y ago

In a previous post, the author mentions a few benchmarks comparing Mac vs Linux trackpad performance: https://archive.is/s7SZM https://archive.is/s7SZM 1. Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing. As of today, I can consistently score twice as high on macOS (average score 250 with “Hard” + “Small” options) vs Linux (average score ~100). 2. Visual or terminal-based means to configure rudimentary touchpad settings. The fewest options I could imagine supporting for v1 would be: scroll speed/acceleration, scroll speed, natural scrolling toggle, hopefully support for gestures. 3. First-class palm and thumb detection/ignoring

cycloptic 7y ago
Number 1 seems wildly subjective based on the person's level of dexterity and the hardware used. The only way I could see that being meaningful if you did it on the exact same laptop side by side with Mac and Linux and tweaked the acceleration profile, but it doesn't actually sound like the author is talking about installing Linux on a macbook. Numbers 2 and 3 are already in libinput. I am still struggling to understand what it is the author feels they need to fork the project for; there is some additional software that needs to be provided to really get the mac-like desktop experience with gestures, but that is covered by the libinput-gestures project. https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures
- ashtonkem 7y ago
  Number 1 is like a relative benchmark on the same hardware, as compared to a production grade loadtest. While there’s no guarantee that any of us can match their performance, relative improvements matter.
  - cycloptic 7y ago
    I see what you mean but that still would require testing on the same hardware repeatedly to really get a picture of what is going on. Then you could potentially making some small tweaks to the acceleration profile, but it's really a tiny amount of code.
blauditore 7y ago
>Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing It looks like this doesn't take viewport size into account. A smaller window still shows dots of the same size, just distributed over a smaller area. Given that it's (more) idiomatic to maximize windows under Linux and Windows than under MacOS, those results could be skewed.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > Given that it's (more) idiomatic to maximize windows under Linux and Windows than under MacOS _Is_ it? I know that it seems to be kind of a thing on Windows, but I've never really noticed it with Linux.
  - _jal 7y ago
    That's actually an interesting question, I'm not sure if anyone's looked at it. It probably depends heavily on your window manager of choice (some of them take the choice out of your hands). For my part, I don't use a tiling window manager, and the only things I maximize sometimes are VM displays.
  - toast0 7y ago
    Well, on Windows and Linux, the maximize button almost always works, where on MacOS it does something, but after using one for work for 7 years, I still don't know what it's supposed to do. I'm not a big maximizer though, big desktop monitors and maximized windows aren't good for me.
  - blauditore 7y ago
    Well, Windows and the most common Linux DEs make it easy to maximize windows, while on MacOS there's only a full screen button by default (which is not the same and most people probably don't want). My anecdotal observation has been that Mac users end up manually resizing windows often, to increase size to a large portion of the screen when necessary - but they don't fully maximize windows.
vzaliva 7y ago
From somebody who worked on touch intefraces: #1 could be hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads detects finger coordinates in firmware and send them to driver. Driver has not much to do to improve accuracy besides some high-level smoothing like Kalman filter. #2 is could be useful. Not that tools are completely lacking, but they can use some polish and unification. #3 is again hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads do palm detection in firmware. Nothing you can do to improve that. In the most cases it is not even possible to get a "raw" sensor reading.

by danso 7y ago

cycloptic 7y ago

Number 1 seems wildly subjective based on the person's level of dexterity and the hardware used. The only way I could see that being meaningful if you did it on the exact same laptop side by side with Mac and Linux and tweaked the acceleration profile, but it doesn't actually sound like the author is talking about installing Linux on a macbook. Numbers 2 and 3 are already in libinput. I am still struggling to understand what it is the author feels they need to fork the project for; there is some additional software that needs to be provided to really get the mac-like desktop experience with gestures, but that is covered by the libinput-gestures project. https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures

ashtonkem 7y ago
Number 1 is like a relative benchmark on the same hardware, as compared to a production grade loadtest. While there’s no guarantee that any of us can match their performance, relative improvements matter.
- cycloptic 7y ago
  I see what you mean but that still would require testing on the same hardware repeatedly to really get a picture of what is going on. Then you could potentially making some small tweaks to the acceleration profile, but it's really a tiny amount of code.

blauditore 7y ago

>Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing It looks like this doesn't take viewport size into account. A smaller window still shows dots of the same size, just distributed over a smaller area. Given that it's (more) idiomatic to maximize windows under Linux and Windows than under MacOS, those results could be skewed.

rsynnott 7y ago
> Given that it's (more) idiomatic to maximize windows under Linux and Windows than under MacOS _Is_ it? I know that it seems to be kind of a thing on Windows, but I've never really noticed it with Linux.
- _jal 7y ago
  That's actually an interesting question, I'm not sure if anyone's looked at it. It probably depends heavily on your window manager of choice (some of them take the choice out of your hands). For my part, I don't use a tiling window manager, and the only things I maximize sometimes are VM displays.
- toast0 7y ago
  Well, on Windows and Linux, the maximize button almost always works, where on MacOS it does something, but after using one for work for 7 years, I still don't know what it's supposed to do. I'm not a big maximizer though, big desktop monitors and maximized windows aren't good for me.
- blauditore 7y ago
  Well, Windows and the most common Linux DEs make it easy to maximize windows, while on MacOS there's only a full screen button by default (which is not the same and most people probably don't want). My anecdotal observation has been that Mac users end up manually resizing windows often, to increase size to a large portion of the screen when necessary - but they don't fully maximize windows.

vzaliva 7y ago

From somebody who worked on touch intefraces: #1 could be hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads detects finger coordinates in firmware and send them to driver. Driver has not much to do to improve accuracy besides some high-level smoothing like Kalman filter. #2 is could be useful. Not that tools are completely lacking, but they can use some polish and unification. #3 is again hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads do palm detection in firmware. Nothing you can do to improve that. In the most cases it is not even possible to get a "raw" sensor reading.