15 ms·

Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

224 points by wbharding 6y ago

phoe-krk 6y ago
> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.
- raybb 6y ago
  Link to donate: https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear
  - Jnr 6y ago
    But who is that guy and how would the money be used? From his profile it doesn't seem like he is a Linux developer.
    - dastx 6y ago
      He's not, but he's going to hire a developer who can develop this. The full donation will go to said developer.
    - seltzered_ 6y ago
      I'm someone who's highly interested in this and am not a linux developer either. He's been trying to evangelize this effort for years. Not everyone has to be a developer - some of us may see better roles as funders, testers, project managers, etc.
- coldpie 6y ago
  Ahh, the ol' conversion funnel. Applies any time you want to separate someone from their money.
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  I answered the poll, and said I would pay $50 for this, but never received any follow up (and I think I provided my email, I usually do in polls if they give the option). Now I just realized that there is a github sponsor link, but it's recurring. I don't want recurring. I want to send $50 once.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    I am in exactly the same position. Happy to donate $100 once, but mot happy to sign up to a recurring subscription.
  - forbiddenlake 6y ago
    You can sign up, pay once, then cancel.
    - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
      So many companies made unsubscribing too hard that I wouldn’t even try it with github.
      - kelnos 6y ago
        I just did this, and it's very easy. After you cancel, GH even puts up a multiple-choice "why did you cancel?" survey, and one of the options is "wanted to make a one-time donation".
        saagarjha 6y ago
        Perhaps they should make that an official option at that point…
    - grawprog 6y ago
      Why should the onus be on me to make sure I don't pay more money than I want? I can't stand this 'just subscribe then cancel' mentality. I would like the option for a one time payment for things without having to fuck around starting and cancelling subscriptions. It's just ridiculous.
- trombonechamp 6y ago
  The poll respondents did not indicate they would be willing to donate to the cause. They indicated they would be willing to donate to "fix it". There is a very big difference between paying to fix a problem and paying for a stranger to work on a project that may end up fixing the problem one day.
  - BiteCode_dev 6y ago
    Honestly at this point I wouldn't care. Give me a kickstarter link with a the poll author as the champion, and I would insta send money. I can afford a few bucks to help somebody to attempt to solve the problem. I'm even ok with failure as long as it's an honest attempt.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      I think a successful way to do this is Neovim's BountySource which was perfectly run, imho. There was a "if it hits $x tarruda will work on it" thing which is all I wanted.
- wegs 6y ago
  Well, let me put it this way. I would donate $250 to fix it. I think that's how much working support for touch, trackpad, and pen input would be worth it to me. I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves. I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" approach), especially with the claimed problem, solution, and approaches. With open source, it's easy to find people to do the fun, modular bits (acceleration curves, palm rejection, etc.). It's hard to find people to do the plumbing and the not-fun bits. If OP were to create a pipeline which: * Supported the broad range of trackpads, tablets, styluses, etc. on the market * Did this with clean abstractions and modular drivers (NOT wrappers around wrappers around wrappers of what other people have written, but the painful work of refactoring other people's code) * Integrated with the desktop properly, potentially extending existing standards if necessary (NOT tried to replace the desktop with yet another standard no one supports) * Handled the odd-ball cases (a touchscreen, a drawing tablet, a drawing display, AND a plain old monitor are plugged into a box. What happens?) * Provided clean, simple, documented, pluggable APIs where people could tinker around with the fun stuff (anyone can make a new algorithm in Python and see it work in 5 minutes) That would solve the problem. For reference, their approach: "(1) evaluate which multi-touch features can be implemented with the least work 2) start to quantify the current nature of palm detection 3) measure how the acceleration curve of Linux touchpad compares to that of macOS. I have some ideas on how we might calibrate the acceleration curve to better match macOS, but it would be handy if anyone else has bright ideas on how they would attempt to quantify the touchpad acceleration curve on macOS (such that we can seek to match it here)." I could be wrong about all of this, but that's what it would take for ME to donate. I guess the other approach is to accomplish something yourself and establish a track record. I WILL instead donate to DIGImend, where a lone developer seems to heroically be successfully bringing tablet support to Linux. That's an example of a track record. https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=930980 https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=930980 https://liberapay.com/spbnick/donate https://liberapay.com/spbnick/donate https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spbnick https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spbnick I'm sure this will go -5, since most critical posts do, but I find critical feedback to be more important than positivisty. edit: Just donated to DIGImend.
  - 6y ago
- nanna 6y ago
  For me the problem is that the minimum of $5 per month is just too much. I would like to see this work done, but not for $60 a year (plus fees?). I fall into the category of being alright with the state of my trackpad, so $60 is just more than I will give. Edit: I'd gladly donate $2 or $3 per month.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Damn, for $60 you can get one bangin' mouse to carry with you and problem solved.
    - nanna 6y ago
      Maybe so, but there'd still be so many problems left! And they need money too.
    - robrtsql 6y ago
      I can't use a mouse on my lap, though.
      - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
        Just out of curiosity, why do you need to do work on your lap? The posture is really bad and unhealthy. Doesn't anyone own a table for eating where you can use your laptop as well? I've been owning laptops for 12 years now and never used it on my lap. The only times I saw people use laptops on their laps is on TV.
        myself248 6y ago
        I use my laptop on my lap or in bed all the time. I own a couple of perfectly fine mice, but the reason laptops have touchpads built into them in the first place is that they're not always well suited to mice. If I wanted a computer I could only use at a desk with a mouse, I'd have bought a desktop.
        robrtsql 6y ago
eth0up 6y ago
Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux, is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness" sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the wiki for Unethical Human Experimentation. Of course, Linux is not entirely to blame; the physical quality has declined immensely for most touch/clickpads. Perhaps someday I'll experience playing go without a mouse and risk of hypertension. I'm typically not one to use the term - but godspeed, in this case!
- edjrage 6y ago
  If a touchpad does this much to you I'm sorry to inform you may have a more serious problem than the touchpad. Sleep, diet, exercise, and meditation.
  - sitkack 6y ago
    Says the guy using a Mac, the best touchpad within 5 parsecs.
    - edjrage 6y ago
      Actually such an aggressive response (from the GP, not you) is precisely the kind of thing I'd expect from someone who has an easy life. I live in pretty crappy conditions, including a crappy computer with crappy touchpad drivers. I just refuse to let such mundane things give me hypertension.
      - sitkack 6y ago
        I have an old X1 Carbon that I use at the grunge travel laptop, like throw it in the backpack in a paper bag and go for a hike level of grunge. Its trackpad is junk, phantom movements, zero palm rejection. I coded up some lock scripts so that it locks out the buttons if the cursor is moved. I fantasize about DeepTrack, the AGI that will finally give me trackpad bliss on a Linux desktop.
ghostpepper 6y ago
Off topic but did anyone else notice that this entire blog post is actually hosted on a site called amplenote? With uMatrix enabled, the wordpress blog just shows an empty post with a broken iframe. Is this a common architecture? What's the purpose?
- bArray 6y ago
  On my system the iframe is really small but the content is in there. I've seen a bunch of sites doing this recently and it's quite annoying.
  - ghostpepper 6y ago
    Just to be clear my settings deliberately block iframes by default until I allow them. I just thought it was odd that the whole Wordpress blog is literally window dressing.
- boudin 6y ago
  My guess would be that it allows the author to push notes from his note taking software to his blog directly.
rcthompson 6y ago
I'm a little unclear on how close to the funding goal this is. As far as I can tell, the goal is $10k total, but the current funding level shown is per month. Does it just mean that work can't begin until the accrued balance reaches $10k? Also, is there a way to make a one-time donation rather than an ongoing monthly pledge?
fortran77 6y ago
No multitouch!?
- boudin 6y ago
  Yeah, didn't get that. Multitouch is definitely there. Not all gestures though.
  - skykooler 6y ago
    It very much depends on what hardware you have currently.
squid_demon 6y ago
Will Linux fix their mouse support as part of this project?
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Came here to say the same thing. Every Linux distro release the mouse finds a new way to break -- different acceleration profile, impossibly slow followed by impossibly fast, etc. -- and I have to update my fix_mouse.sh autorun script to scan for whatever the new xinput parameter names are. It's unfortunately distressingly common in software, but especially Linux GUIs, to fix one thing by breaking three others instead of identifying a better framework to fix the root cause. The Linux kernel does seem to be good at that last part, but not the desktop projects.
  - techntoke 6y ago
    Never had an issue before. What distro and window manager are you using? I'm running Arch with Sway and no issues whatsoever with the mouse.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Kububtu with a Logitech G500s set to ~2000dpi and a 250Hz or 500Hz report rate. I had similar issues with other DEs and login managers in the past. I keep meaning to try KDE Neon or switch back to Mint or something, but I have very little desire to mess with my OS these days.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    > The Linux kernel does seem to be good at that last part, but not the desktop projects. That's because there are a shitload of them, there's way more than just the big players KDE and Gnome. Then the stack is highly complex with technology in the mix that is decades old (X11 dates back to 1987, that stuff is older than me!), and political infighting between competing (corporate or personal) interests doesn't help this either. Android has multitouch solved, but at the cost of building everything from scratch and lots of stuff still being kept in proprietary firmware blobs for touch controllers. And there is only one Android stack, not two dozen...
viseztrance 6y ago
I can hardly tell the difference between my razer stealth linux touchpad and my workprovided macbook. Even based on the feedback, it seems that most people are okay with their touchpad experience and are more interested in advanced features like multitouch. Having this said, for myself this is a tough sell. I'm concerned that I would donate and I won't be able to tell the difference between this and some placebo drivers.
- horsawlarway 6y ago
  I'm in exactly the same spot with a (reasonably old 2017 model) Dell XPS. Wayland with libinput has been a JOY to use compared to basically anything I've used in linux before. I tried running an X based DE about 2 years ago on this machine and actually went back to running it in a VM in windows because the touchpad felt so shoddy. No problems at all with the current setup. Can barely tell the different between my work Mac and the XPS. From my view, this whole issue is resolved.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    What is the difference between wayland + libinput and X + libinput precisely?
    - horsawlarway 6y ago
      Maybe it's just time and continued development on libinput, but the differences I found are: Two fingered scroll works by default Sensitivity/Acceleration curves basically match OSX out of the box Right click on two finger tap is easily enabled and feels good Support for multi finger swipe (3/4 fingers) easily enabled and feels good Palm detection is MILES better (I have huge hands and this is a serious problem) --- Each of those was a serious issue 3 years ago trying to get things working through xinput (although again, I migrated to wayland about 1.5 years ago and have never looked back so maybe it's better now) X and xinput give folks a TON of options, and in certain situations that's great. But most of the time (all of the time in my experience) it led to bad defaults and consistently broken settings after upgrades. I genuinely enjoy the zero configuration approach Wayland has taken here with libinput. I'm on a mac for work, and while I really disagree with Apple's philosophy, I can't argue that they provide a simple and fantastic touchpad experience. I get that by default on my current setup and it feels nice. I genuinely enjoy most aspects of system management, but trial and error editing of magic numbers in an xorg conf file for my touchpad just sucked.
_ZeD_ 6y ago
So am I the only one that really hate multitouch. The really thing I want is * left click on the left side of the touchpad * right click on the right side of the touchpad * right and bottom area to scroll (with ONE DAMN FINGER)
- seph-reed 6y ago
  Of course not. But as much as you hate it, I love it, and it turns out most of the work needed to have things our own way is shared. As a person who just wants the MacOs experience, I'll gladly support the fact that you should be able to make it work the way you want too.
ZeroCool2u 6y ago
As one of the people that said I'd donate to this cause and setup my first GitHub sponsorship for this project, I'm very excited!
tadfisher 6y ago
After using a Steam Controller for a couple of years, I would love to use its trackball-emulation feature with my laptop touchpad. Would anyone else like to see this feature experimented with?
gertrunde 6y ago
I'm faintly curious, how does the MacOS "Touchpad Experience" referenced in question #1 differ from the Windows one? (Or any other OS?) (Background to my ignorance: While I do (very) occasionaly use MacOS, I usually default to the terminal as it's more familiar... and probably spend most (60-70%) of my time connected to linux or unix-like systems via cli/ssh... from a Windows system.) Are we talking touch gestures or something? Or multi-finger things? Are they really that massively different? Surely a touchpad is a touchpad? (Not counting those awful things without proper buttons).
- fearface 6y ago
  The touchpad on my Lenovo X1 Extreme has a noticable delay (maybe 300ms) of when it starts working after I used the keyboard. Instead of real palm detection, it gets into some kind of sleep mode.
- sethhochberg 6y ago
  You'd think "surely a touchpad is a touchpad", but the reality for most heavy users is that Apple really does have an experience substantially better than most in this area. Large tracking surface. No dead zones, which can't be touched or tapped. Fantastic palm rejection. Gestures that work reliably, and never over or under-detect fingers. Its not really to say that the Apple trackpads are better at their best than the other vendors, as much as it is that the other vendors often behave in unpredictable ways. I used to have a Thinkpad which worked every bit as well as my current Macbook trackpad when it worked right, but which would frequently fail to recognize a finger during a scrolling gesture, couldn't be clicked on the portion closest to the keyboard, and occasionally the palm rejection just wouldn't work. The minor annoyances over time add up to a much more frustrating experience.
  - aarmenaa 6y ago
    I've noticed that two-finger scrolling, which should be one of the easiest things to get right, is wrong on basically anything that's not MacOS. Windows and Linux arbitrarily insist on 3-line scrolling in a lot of apps. Even when pixel scrolling is technically available, it works poorly. It appears small movements are ignored, and then once you've hit some sort of distance threshold the scroll "jumps" to register the whole movement. There's weird delays where you need to "un-touch" the pad before you can transition from moving the cursor to scrolling. The scroll gets "dropped" after a while even though I still have two fingers on the pad. I've seen all this across many laptops running Linux and Windows, including Macs, which leads me to believe that that the issue software.
dmix 6y ago
Looks like the number of contributors have doubled since this post hit the frontpage. That's great, this is one of the few things left that held back Linux desktop, and it wasn't even that bad with some tweaking but it shouldn't need tweaking. Gnome has made drastic improvements in recent years as well. Now if only companies would fund proper open source graphics drivers then there would be no reason for developers to not use Linux. Otherwise you need to buy a laptop with Linux in mind and you'll be fine.
- peatmoss 6y ago
  Re GPU: Running a desktop with a shiny new AMD 5700-xt, and it has been pretty excellent. Only nit to pick is that I had to add a small bit of configuration to enable FreeSync support with my monitor. Performance in various Steam games (native as well as emulated via Proton) has not been a disappointment. That said, previously had an NVidia card that worked okay with Ubuntu, but required enabling some proprietary drivers. It worked fine, but was an extra hoop to jump, and using proprietary drivers sticks in my craw. If I did anything on my desktop that relied on CUDA, I suspect I’d be stuck with using the proprietary NVidia drivers.
wbharding 6y ago
This project is now up to 75 supporters and $800 monthly sponsor estimate, which should be a good enough starting point to start talking to devs. Thanks a bunch, HN!
kevincox 6y ago
I've used a mac occasionally and there are really only two features I miss from the trackpad level: - Add a finger to click. This is very useful to be able to click without stopping dragging your finger. - The acceleration curve for pointing feels more natural. This was surprising to me because I use Linux primarily but I feel like I hit targets slightly more on MacOS. With libinput I have found that multi-touch gestures work really well we are just missing application support. It seems that this project doesn't aim to work on applications at all so for me it seems like they are barking up the wrong tree. For example I would love to have Firefox wired up to linux three-finger swipe gestures for forward/back (and I bind down -> Scroll To Top and up -> Close tab).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
odiroot 6y ago
My god. I hope Ubuntu is not going to jump on this quickly. My current setup with Synaptics and just two manual tweaks is perfect for me. The way MacBook touchpads work always irked me, always felt off. But maybe it's necessary for MacBooks with their enormous tachpad surfaces.
myself248 6y ago
This is still the most frustrating thing about Linux for me. I have two Thinkpads, a T460 running Windows from my employer, and a T560 running Ubuntu as my personal. Their touchpad hardware is, of course, identical. The experiences couldn't be more different. When I first got the machine, I spent weeks fighting with the driver, trying to figure out how a single number can represent four lines on two dimensions to define a region where palm-touch should be ignored. I still haven't gotten pointer precision where I'd like it; I simply know that getting within ten pixels is the best I can hope for without infuriatingly slow rocking and coaxing my finger around. It's disappointing to say the least. Honestly what I'd like most, is a WINE-like shim to simply let me run the Windows driver in some sort of sandbox and take its mouse-events to the Linux input system. Synaptics has clearly done the work to make the thing behave the way I'd like, and it would be the coolest thing if identical settings were equivalent and portable between machines.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  This is one of the reasons I like WSL, it uses the windows drivers for things but I get the Linux user land (and much of the kernel with WSL2).
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  Am I the only one who finds the Synaptics trackpads on many laptops are simply a nightmare in itself regardless of the operating system due to the physical design? Not all Synaptics trackpads are created equal, on some machines, the surface friction just doesn't feel correct, making the pointer acceleration difficult to control. I know I was probably using it wrong and I should've spent an hour tweaking the parameters in the Synaptics Windows Driver, but I don't really know what's the best for me. Even worse, some Synaptics trackpads have cheap plastic that worn out after a year or so, creating an uneven friction, making the navigation a difficult experience. I know I could replace it, but making the touchpad as a consumable item is not a good design. Also, on many ultralight machines, the available space is simply too small to have an adequate space for plamrest. Finally, as a matter of personal preference, I found clicking the button on the touchpad is never a good experience - the pad is clickable, but only on its edge, or you could touch-click, but you need to constantly lifting your finger. The touch gestures are confusing as well, to this day I never figured out any of the gesture I could use. The device driver really should come with an animated tutorial. The only feature I found was scrolling at the edge or double-finger scrolling, but it's only useful if you want to scroll a few lines, rolling the entire page is a tiresome experience (unlike the middle-button scrolling on a TrackPoint). As a result, I only use the TrackPoint on Thinkpad laptops. Although the TrackPoint is not completely free from the pointer acceleration issue in general on Linux (although I never found it to be an issue for me), the overall usability is much better because it doesn't have the physical design issues.
blendergeek 6y ago
Honestly, I hate the Apple touchpad experience. I love Linux touchpad experience, except for when there are multiple drivers available and depending on which one is being used, my settings change. Oh, and, 'tap to click' should be default.
- ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
  >I hate the Apple touchpad experience You're definitely in the minority on that. > Oh, and, 'tap to click' should be default. Okay, now you're just trolling.
  - blendergeek 6y ago
    I really do like tap-to-click. I may be in the minority. After checking the numbers again, I'm definitely in the minority on HN. But, no, I'm not trolling. Tap-to-click is sooooooo nice. I can use all touch pads the same whether or not they can be clicked all over. I don't have to click (which makes a sound). I know that sound may not annoy everybody, but i was once recording audio, and every file started with a 'click' sound ... until i enabled tap-to-click. And i have never looked back. The one thing i love about Apple touch pads is 'natural scrolling'. What a beauty.
bchociej 6y ago
Color me stunned that people are so dissatisfied with their touchpads in Linux. 0-3 lines of options in my config have made me perfectly content with every touchpad I've ever used in Linux.
- rurban 6y ago
  Care to share? Would be really appreciated
  - bchociej 6y ago
    I am away from my laptop for the time being, unfortunately. But it's generally a bit of pointer acceleration and enabling two finger scrolling, if I have to configure anything at all.
sandov 6y ago
As a touchpad-ignorant person (I have not used Macbook touchpad, so I don't know what I'm missing) Linux touchpad support had always seemed fine to me until distros started using libinput by default. Last time I tried libinput, I couldn't disable acceleration on touchpads. "Flat" acceleration profile still had acceleration.
- bschwindHN 6y ago
  If you're happy with the current state on linux...don't ever use a macbook trackpad. It'll ruin you.
bubblethink 6y ago
I just hope that libinput matches the xorg synaptics driver before it is deprecated. On every major OS release, I try the live cd to check if the touchpad with libinput is on par with synaptics, but it isn't there yet.
- floatboth 6y ago
  libinput has been far ahead of xorg synaptics since forever.
pmontra 6y ago
I've been using Ubuntu since 2009, two HP laptops and zero problems with the touchpad. I used the first one with Windows for two years and the touchpad behaved better with Ubuntu than with Windows. I think the improvement was two finger scrolling instead of sliding on the right edge. I used only Ubuntu on the second laptop so I can't do any comparison but I never felt anything wrong with the touchpad. HP nc8430 and ZBook 15 first gen.
noobermin 6y ago
I guess it helps not to get used to "better experiences" just judging by the comments here. I bought a laptop and and have dual boot but use linux primarily. Every time I'd have to use Windows, it would be a serious frustrating pain in the ass. A lot of these things I am 999% convinced are just based on familiarity than actual ergonomics.
- masnao 6y ago
  that's the main problem with suse, rh, Ubuntu, ibm etc contributing to linux. they pay designers doing a job on their macbooks or windows. Ubuntu went as far as forking the WM and suse for the longest time looked like every application was a windows installation wizard.
- kochthesecond 6y ago
  Well, the Mac trackpad is an absolute joy to use.. The quality of trackpads outside of Macs used to annoy me to no end, but my 2018 zenbook with libinput isn't that bad. It's like 80% of the way there for a quarter of the price.
cmeacham98 6y ago
Interestingly, I seem to have had the opposite experience of many people in this thread. On windows, the touchpad driver uses this annoying tray application, defaults to "tap = click" (does anybody seriously like this behavior on trackpads with physical buttons?), and also includes some easy to trigger gestures I often hit causing my windows to do something stupid. On linux the drivers have always "just worked", felt like similar mouse movement/scrolling to windows, and didn't come with tap to click or gestures I never used.
yencabulator 6y ago
Q3 bars go 2 1 3 4 5.
seltzered_ 6y ago
The donation link seems fairly buried under the comments, but here it is again: https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

224 points by wbharding 6y ago

> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.

raybb 6y ago
Link to donate: https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear
- Jnr 6y ago
  But who is that guy and how would the money be used? From his profile it doesn't seem like he is a Linux developer.
  - dastx 6y ago
    He's not, but he's going to hire a developer who can develop this. The full donation will go to said developer.
  - seltzered_ 6y ago
    I'm someone who's highly interested in this and am not a linux developer either. He's been trying to evangelize this effort for years. Not everyone has to be a developer - some of us may see better roles as funders, testers, project managers, etc.
coldpie 6y ago
Ahh, the ol' conversion funnel. Applies any time you want to separate someone from their money.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
I answered the poll, and said I would pay $50 for this, but never received any follow up (and I think I provided my email, I usually do in polls if they give the option). Now I just realized that there is a github sponsor link, but it's recurring. I don't want recurring. I want to send $50 once.
- rkangel 6y ago
  I am in exactly the same position. Happy to donate $100 once, but mot happy to sign up to a recurring subscription.
- forbiddenlake 6y ago
  You can sign up, pay once, then cancel.
  - GoOnThenDoTell 6y ago
    So many companies made unsubscribing too hard that I wouldn’t even try it with github.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I just did this, and it's very easy. After you cancel, GH even puts up a multiple-choice "why did you cancel?" survey, and one of the options is "wanted to make a one-time donation".
      - saagarjha 6y ago
        Perhaps they should make that an official option at that point…
  - grawprog 6y ago
    Why should the onus be on me to make sure I don't pay more money than I want? I can't stand this 'just subscribe then cancel' mentality. I would like the option for a one time payment for things without having to fuck around starting and cancelling subscriptions. It's just ridiculous.
trombonechamp 6y ago
The poll respondents did not indicate they would be willing to donate to the cause. They indicated they would be willing to donate to "fix it". There is a very big difference between paying to fix a problem and paying for a stranger to work on a project that may end up fixing the problem one day.
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Honestly at this point I wouldn't care. Give me a kickstarter link with a the poll author as the champion, and I would insta send money. I can afford a few bucks to help somebody to attempt to solve the problem. I'm even ok with failure as long as it's an honest attempt.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    I think a successful way to do this is Neovim's BountySource which was perfectly run, imho. There was a "if it hits $x tarruda will work on it" thing which is all I wanted.
wegs 6y ago
Well, let me put it this way. I would donate $250 to fix it. I think that's how much working support for touch, trackpad, and pen input would be worth it to me. I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves. I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" approach), especially with the claimed problem, solution, and approaches. With open source, it's easy to find people to do the fun, modular bits (acceleration curves, palm rejection, etc.). It's hard to find people to do the plumbing and the not-fun bits. If OP were to create a pipeline which: * Supported the broad range of trackpads, tablets, styluses, etc. on the market * Did this with clean abstractions and modular drivers (NOT wrappers around wrappers around wrappers of what other people have written, but the painful work of refactoring other people's code) * Integrated with the desktop properly, potentially extending existing standards if necessary (NOT tried to replace the desktop with yet another standard no one supports) * Handled the odd-ball cases (a touchscreen, a drawing tablet, a drawing display, AND a plain old monitor are plugged into a box. What happens?) * Provided clean, simple, documented, pluggable APIs where people could tinker around with the fun stuff (anyone can make a new algorithm in Python and see it work in 5 minutes) That would solve the problem. For reference, their approach: "(1) evaluate which multi-touch features can be implemented with the least work 2) start to quantify the current nature of palm detection 3) measure how the acceleration curve of Linux touchpad compares to that of macOS. I have some ideas on how we might calibrate the acceleration curve to better match macOS, but it would be handy if anyone else has bright ideas on how they would attempt to quantify the touchpad acceleration curve on macOS (such that we can seek to match it here)." I could be wrong about all of this, but that's what it would take for ME to donate. I guess the other approach is to accomplish something yourself and establish a track record. I WILL instead donate to DIGImend, where a lone developer seems to heroically be successfully bringing tablet support to Linux. That's an example of a track record. https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=930980 https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=930980 https://liberapay.com/spbnick/donate https://liberapay.com/spbnick/donate https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spbnick https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spbnick I'm sure this will go -5, since most critical posts do, but I find critical feedback to be more important than positivisty. edit: Just donated to DIGImend.
- 6y ago
nanna 6y ago
For me the problem is that the minimum of $5 per month is just too much. I would like to see this work done, but not for $60 a year (plus fees?). I fall into the category of being alright with the state of my trackpad, so $60 is just more than I will give. Edit: I'd gladly donate $2 or $3 per month.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Damn, for $60 you can get one bangin' mouse to carry with you and problem solved.
  - nanna 6y ago
    Maybe so, but there'd still be so many problems left! And they need money too.
  - robrtsql 6y ago
    I can't use a mouse on my lap, though.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      Just out of curiosity, why do you need to do work on your lap? The posture is really bad and unhealthy. Doesn't anyone own a table for eating where you can use your laptop as well? I've been owning laptops for 12 years now and never used it on my lap. The only times I saw people use laptops on their laps is on TV.
      - myself248 6y ago
        I use my laptop on my lap or in bed all the time. I own a couple of perfectly fine mice, but the reason laptops have touchpads built into them in the first place is that they're not always well suited to mice. If I wanted a computer I could only use at a desk with a mouse, I'd have bought a desktop.
      - robrtsql 6y ago

eth0up 6y ago

Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux, is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness" sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the wiki for Unethical Human Experimentation. Of course, Linux is not entirely to blame; the physical quality has declined immensely for most touch/clickpads. Perhaps someday I'll experience playing go without a mouse and risk of hypertension. I'm typically not one to use the term - but godspeed, in this case!

edjrage 6y ago
If a touchpad does this much to you I'm sorry to inform you may have a more serious problem than the touchpad. Sleep, diet, exercise, and meditation.
- sitkack 6y ago
  Says the guy using a Mac, the best touchpad within 5 parsecs.
  - edjrage 6y ago
    Actually such an aggressive response (from the GP, not you) is precisely the kind of thing I'd expect from someone who has an easy life. I live in pretty crappy conditions, including a crappy computer with crappy touchpad drivers. I just refuse to let such mundane things give me hypertension.
    - sitkack 6y ago
      I have an old X1 Carbon that I use at the grunge travel laptop, like throw it in the backpack in a paper bag and go for a hike level of grunge. Its trackpad is junk, phantom movements, zero palm rejection. I coded up some lock scripts so that it locks out the buttons if the cursor is moved. I fantasize about DeepTrack, the AGI that will finally give me trackpad bliss on a Linux desktop.

ghostpepper 6y ago

Off topic but did anyone else notice that this entire blog post is actually hosted on a site called amplenote? With uMatrix enabled, the wordpress blog just shows an empty post with a broken iframe. Is this a common architecture? What's the purpose?

bArray 6y ago
On my system the iframe is really small but the content is in there. I've seen a bunch of sites doing this recently and it's quite annoying.
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  Just to be clear my settings deliberately block iframes by default until I allow them. I just thought it was odd that the whole Wordpress blog is literally window dressing.
boudin 6y ago
My guess would be that it allows the author to push notes from his note taking software to his blog directly.

rcthompson 6y ago

I'm a little unclear on how close to the funding goal this is. As far as I can tell, the goal is $10k total, but the current funding level shown is per month. Does it just mean that work can't begin until the accrued balance reaches $10k? Also, is there a way to make a one-time donation rather than an ongoing monthly pledge?

fortran77 6y ago

No multitouch!?

boudin 6y ago
Yeah, didn't get that. Multitouch is definitely there. Not all gestures though.
- skykooler 6y ago
  It very much depends on what hardware you have currently.

squid_demon 6y ago

Will Linux fix their mouse support as part of this project?

nitrogen 6y ago
Came here to say the same thing. Every Linux distro release the mouse finds a new way to break -- different acceleration profile, impossibly slow followed by impossibly fast, etc. -- and I have to update my fix_mouse.sh autorun script to scan for whatever the new xinput parameter names are. It's unfortunately distressingly common in software, but especially Linux GUIs, to fix one thing by breaking three others instead of identifying a better framework to fix the root cause. The Linux kernel does seem to be good at that last part, but not the desktop projects.
- techntoke 6y ago
  Never had an issue before. What distro and window manager are you using? I'm running Arch with Sway and no issues whatsoever with the mouse.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Kububtu with a Logitech G500s set to ~2000dpi and a 250Hz or 500Hz report rate. I had similar issues with other DEs and login managers in the past. I keep meaning to try KDE Neon or switch back to Mint or something, but I have very little desire to mess with my OS these days.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > The Linux kernel does seem to be good at that last part, but not the desktop projects. That's because there are a shitload of them, there's way more than just the big players KDE and Gnome. Then the stack is highly complex with technology in the mix that is decades old (X11 dates back to 1987, that stuff is older than me!), and political infighting between competing (corporate or personal) interests doesn't help this either. Android has multitouch solved, but at the cost of building everything from scratch and lots of stuff still being kept in proprietary firmware blobs for touch controllers. And there is only one Android stack, not two dozen...

viseztrance 6y ago

I can hardly tell the difference between my razer stealth linux touchpad and my workprovided macbook. Even based on the feedback, it seems that most people are okay with their touchpad experience and are more interested in advanced features like multitouch. Having this said, for myself this is a tough sell. I'm concerned that I would donate and I won't be able to tell the difference between this and some placebo drivers.

horsawlarway 6y ago
I'm in exactly the same spot with a (reasonably old 2017 model) Dell XPS. Wayland with libinput has been a JOY to use compared to basically anything I've used in linux before. I tried running an X based DE about 2 years ago on this machine and actually went back to running it in a VM in windows because the touchpad felt so shoddy. No problems at all with the current setup. Can barely tell the different between my work Mac and the XPS. From my view, this whole issue is resolved.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  What is the difference between wayland + libinput and X + libinput precisely?
  - horsawlarway 6y ago
    Maybe it's just time and continued development on libinput, but the differences I found are: Two fingered scroll works by default Sensitivity/Acceleration curves basically match OSX out of the box Right click on two finger tap is easily enabled and feels good Support for multi finger swipe (3/4 fingers) easily enabled and feels good Palm detection is MILES better (I have huge hands and this is a serious problem) --- Each of those was a serious issue 3 years ago trying to get things working through xinput (although again, I migrated to wayland about 1.5 years ago and have never looked back so maybe it's better now) X and xinput give folks a TON of options, and in certain situations that's great. But most of the time (all of the time in my experience) it led to bad defaults and consistently broken settings after upgrades. I genuinely enjoy the zero configuration approach Wayland has taken here with libinput. I'm on a mac for work, and while I really disagree with Apple's philosophy, I can't argue that they provide a simple and fantastic touchpad experience. I get that by default on my current setup and it feels nice. I genuinely enjoy most aspects of system management, but trial and error editing of magic numbers in an xorg conf file for my touchpad just sucked.

_ZeD_ 6y ago

So am I the only one that really hate multitouch. The really thing I want is * left click on the left side of the touchpad * right click on the right side of the touchpad * right and bottom area to scroll (with ONE DAMN FINGER)

seph-reed 6y ago
Of course not. But as much as you hate it, I love it, and it turns out most of the work needed to have things our own way is shared. As a person who just wants the MacOs experience, I'll gladly support the fact that you should be able to make it work the way you want too.

ZeroCool2u 6y ago

As one of the people that said I'd donate to this cause and setup my first GitHub sponsorship for this project, I'm very excited!

tadfisher 6y ago

After using a Steam Controller for a couple of years, I would love to use its trackball-emulation feature with my laptop touchpad. Would anyone else like to see this feature experimented with?

gertrunde 6y ago

I'm faintly curious, how does the MacOS "Touchpad Experience" referenced in question #1 differ from the Windows one? (Or any other OS?) (Background to my ignorance: While I do (very) occasionaly use MacOS, I usually default to the terminal as it's more familiar... and probably spend most (60-70%) of my time connected to linux or unix-like systems via cli/ssh... from a Windows system.) Are we talking touch gestures or something? Or multi-finger things? Are they really that massively different? Surely a touchpad is a touchpad? (Not counting those awful things without proper buttons).

fearface 6y ago
The touchpad on my Lenovo X1 Extreme has a noticable delay (maybe 300ms) of when it starts working after I used the keyboard. Instead of real palm detection, it gets into some kind of sleep mode.
sethhochberg 6y ago
You'd think "surely a touchpad is a touchpad", but the reality for most heavy users is that Apple really does have an experience substantially better than most in this area. Large tracking surface. No dead zones, which can't be touched or tapped. Fantastic palm rejection. Gestures that work reliably, and never over or under-detect fingers. Its not really to say that the Apple trackpads are better at their best than the other vendors, as much as it is that the other vendors often behave in unpredictable ways. I used to have a Thinkpad which worked every bit as well as my current Macbook trackpad when it worked right, but which would frequently fail to recognize a finger during a scrolling gesture, couldn't be clicked on the portion closest to the keyboard, and occasionally the palm rejection just wouldn't work. The minor annoyances over time add up to a much more frustrating experience.
- aarmenaa 6y ago
  I've noticed that two-finger scrolling, which should be one of the easiest things to get right, is wrong on basically anything that's not MacOS. Windows and Linux arbitrarily insist on 3-line scrolling in a lot of apps. Even when pixel scrolling is technically available, it works poorly. It appears small movements are ignored, and then once you've hit some sort of distance threshold the scroll "jumps" to register the whole movement. There's weird delays where you need to "un-touch" the pad before you can transition from moving the cursor to scrolling. The scroll gets "dropped" after a while even though I still have two fingers on the pad. I've seen all this across many laptops running Linux and Windows, including Macs, which leads me to believe that that the issue software.

dmix 6y ago

Looks like the number of contributors have doubled since this post hit the frontpage. That's great, this is one of the few things left that held back Linux desktop, and it wasn't even that bad with some tweaking but it shouldn't need tweaking. Gnome has made drastic improvements in recent years as well. Now if only companies would fund proper open source graphics drivers then there would be no reason for developers to not use Linux. Otherwise you need to buy a laptop with Linux in mind and you'll be fine.

peatmoss 6y ago
Re GPU: Running a desktop with a shiny new AMD 5700-xt, and it has been pretty excellent. Only nit to pick is that I had to add a small bit of configuration to enable FreeSync support with my monitor. Performance in various Steam games (native as well as emulated via Proton) has not been a disappointment. That said, previously had an NVidia card that worked okay with Ubuntu, but required enabling some proprietary drivers. It worked fine, but was an extra hoop to jump, and using proprietary drivers sticks in my craw. If I did anything on my desktop that relied on CUDA, I suspect I’d be stuck with using the proprietary NVidia drivers.

wbharding 6y ago

This project is now up to 75 supporters and $800 monthly sponsor estimate, which should be a good enough starting point to start talking to devs. Thanks a bunch, HN!

kevincox 6y ago

I've used a mac occasionally and there are really only two features I miss from the trackpad level: - Add a finger to click. This is very useful to be able to click without stopping dragging your finger. - The acceleration curve for pointing feels more natural. This was surprising to me because I use Linux primarily but I feel like I hit targets slightly more on MacOS. With libinput I have found that multi-touch gestures work really well we are just missing application support. It seems that this project doesn't aim to work on applications at all so for me it seems like they are barking up the wrong tree. For example I would love to have Firefox wired up to linux three-finger swipe gestures for forward/back (and I bind down -> Scroll To Top and up -> Close tab).

deleted 6y ago
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odiroot 6y ago

My god. I hope Ubuntu is not going to jump on this quickly. My current setup with Synaptics and just two manual tweaks is perfect for me. The way MacBook touchpads work always irked me, always felt off. But maybe it's necessary for MacBooks with their enormous tachpad surfaces.

myself248 6y ago

This is still the most frustrating thing about Linux for me. I have two Thinkpads, a T460 running Windows from my employer, and a T560 running Ubuntu as my personal. Their touchpad hardware is, of course, identical. The experiences couldn't be more different. When I first got the machine, I spent weeks fighting with the driver, trying to figure out how a single number can represent four lines on two dimensions to define a region where palm-touch should be ignored. I still haven't gotten pointer precision where I'd like it; I simply know that getting within ten pixels is the best I can hope for without infuriatingly slow rocking and coaxing my finger around. It's disappointing to say the least. Honestly what I'd like most, is a WINE-like shim to simply let me run the Windows driver in some sort of sandbox and take its mouse-events to the Linux input system. Synaptics has clearly done the work to make the thing behave the way I'd like, and it would be the coolest thing if identical settings were equivalent and portable between machines.

ChuckMcM 6y ago
This is one of the reasons I like WSL, it uses the windows drivers for things but I get the Linux user land (and much of the kernel with WSL2).
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
Am I the only one who finds the Synaptics trackpads on many laptops are simply a nightmare in itself regardless of the operating system due to the physical design? Not all Synaptics trackpads are created equal, on some machines, the surface friction just doesn't feel correct, making the pointer acceleration difficult to control. I know I was probably using it wrong and I should've spent an hour tweaking the parameters in the Synaptics Windows Driver, but I don't really know what's the best for me. Even worse, some Synaptics trackpads have cheap plastic that worn out after a year or so, creating an uneven friction, making the navigation a difficult experience. I know I could replace it, but making the touchpad as a consumable item is not a good design. Also, on many ultralight machines, the available space is simply too small to have an adequate space for plamrest. Finally, as a matter of personal preference, I found clicking the button on the touchpad is never a good experience - the pad is clickable, but only on its edge, or you could touch-click, but you need to constantly lifting your finger. The touch gestures are confusing as well, to this day I never figured out any of the gesture I could use. The device driver really should come with an animated tutorial. The only feature I found was scrolling at the edge or double-finger scrolling, but it's only useful if you want to scroll a few lines, rolling the entire page is a tiresome experience (unlike the middle-button scrolling on a TrackPoint). As a result, I only use the TrackPoint on Thinkpad laptops. Although the TrackPoint is not completely free from the pointer acceleration issue in general on Linux (although I never found it to be an issue for me), the overall usability is much better because it doesn't have the physical design issues.

blendergeek 6y ago

Honestly, I hate the Apple touchpad experience. I love Linux touchpad experience, except for when there are multiple drivers available and depending on which one is being used, my settings change. Oh, and, 'tap to click' should be default.

ThePowerOfFuet 6y ago
>I hate the Apple touchpad experience You're definitely in the minority on that. > Oh, and, 'tap to click' should be default. Okay, now you're just trolling.
- blendergeek 6y ago
  I really do like tap-to-click. I may be in the minority. After checking the numbers again, I'm definitely in the minority on HN. But, no, I'm not trolling. Tap-to-click is sooooooo nice. I can use all touch pads the same whether or not they can be clicked all over. I don't have to click (which makes a sound). I know that sound may not annoy everybody, but i was once recording audio, and every file started with a 'click' sound ... until i enabled tap-to-click. And i have never looked back. The one thing i love about Apple touch pads is 'natural scrolling'. What a beauty.

bchociej 6y ago

Color me stunned that people are so dissatisfied with their touchpads in Linux. 0-3 lines of options in my config have made me perfectly content with every touchpad I've ever used in Linux.

rurban 6y ago
Care to share? Would be really appreciated
- bchociej 6y ago
  I am away from my laptop for the time being, unfortunately. But it's generally a bit of pointer acceleration and enabling two finger scrolling, if I have to configure anything at all.

sandov 6y ago

As a touchpad-ignorant person (I have not used Macbook touchpad, so I don't know what I'm missing) Linux touchpad support had always seemed fine to me until distros started using libinput by default. Last time I tried libinput, I couldn't disable acceleration on touchpads. "Flat" acceleration profile still had acceleration.

bschwindHN 6y ago
If you're happy with the current state on linux...don't ever use a macbook trackpad. It'll ruin you.

bubblethink 6y ago

I just hope that libinput matches the xorg synaptics driver before it is deprecated. On every major OS release, I try the live cd to check if the touchpad with libinput is on par with synaptics, but it isn't there yet.

floatboth 6y ago
libinput has been far ahead of xorg synaptics since forever.

pmontra 6y ago

I've been using Ubuntu since 2009, two HP laptops and zero problems with the touchpad. I used the first one with Windows for two years and the touchpad behaved better with Ubuntu than with Windows. I think the improvement was two finger scrolling instead of sliding on the right edge. I used only Ubuntu on the second laptop so I can't do any comparison but I never felt anything wrong with the touchpad. HP nc8430 and ZBook 15 first gen.

noobermin 6y ago

I guess it helps not to get used to "better experiences" just judging by the comments here. I bought a laptop and and have dual boot but use linux primarily. Every time I'd have to use Windows, it would be a serious frustrating pain in the ass. A lot of these things I am 999% convinced are just based on familiarity than actual ergonomics.

masnao 6y ago
that's the main problem with suse, rh, Ubuntu, ibm etc contributing to linux. they pay designers doing a job on their macbooks or windows. Ubuntu went as far as forking the WM and suse for the longest time looked like every application was a windows installation wizard.
kochthesecond 6y ago
Well, the Mac trackpad is an absolute joy to use.. The quality of trackpads outside of Macs used to annoy me to no end, but my 2018 zenbook with libinput isn't that bad. It's like 80% of the way there for a quarter of the price.

cmeacham98 6y ago

Interestingly, I seem to have had the opposite experience of many people in this thread. On windows, the touchpad driver uses this annoying tray application, defaults to "tap = click" (does anybody seriously like this behavior on trackpads with physical buttons?), and also includes some easy to trigger gestures I often hit causing my windows to do something stupid. On linux the drivers have always "just worked", felt like similar mouse movement/scrolling to windows, and didn't come with tap to click or gestures I never used.

yencabulator 6y ago

Q3 bars go 2 1 3 4 5.

seltzered_ 6y ago

The donation link seems fairly buried under the comments, but here it is again: https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear