8 ms·

I guess the problem is that nobody is generating revenue in a meaningful way with desktop Linux. Firms running Linux on servers can pay their employees to cont

by Jonnax 6y ago

I guess the problem is that nobody is generating revenue in a meaningful way with desktop Linux. Firms running Linux on servers can pay their employees to contribute to open source. But a peripheral input driver? Ubuntu had a shot at being "Desktop Linux" but it didn't pan out. Especially when remote desktop on Linux is not very good. (I've only used VNC and XRDP) not to mention a lot of extra packages.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Its probably also because people are motivated to help out when they see work to be done. For me, my mouse and trackpad work just fine. I don't even know what I could work on with such a project. It all just works.
- wang_li 6y ago
  Go read Microsoft's mouse ballistics from way back, if you can find it, then use a mouse on any Windows desktop since XP for a week. Then come back and try a Linux or Mac with an actual mouse instead of a touchpad. You can fix that. It's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20101222190833/http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/pointer-bal.mspx https://web.archive.org/web/20101222190833/http://www.micros...
  - throwaway8941 6y ago
    Please, god no. If anybody really does implement this, at least be kind enough to leave the old behaviour behind a configuration switch.
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    This is the single worst input decision ms has ever made. The first thing you do is to turn that hellish thing of.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      Windows has by far the best mouse input of any OS. What exactly do you want to turn off?
      - badsectoracula 6y ago
        The acceleration (aka ballistics). I want 1:1 mapping of mouse motion to cursor. It is easy to disable on Windows though, just uncheck the "Enhance pointer precision" (award for the most misleading title because it actually makes precision worse). It is annoying in other OSes that you have to jump through hoops to disable that stuff.
        bscphil 6y ago
        > "Enhance pointer precision" (award for the most misleading title because it actually makes precision worse) I would argue that it does enhance the precision if it's correctly implemented. (I haven't used Windows in a decade, so I can't comment on that point.) Example: on a laptop, move the cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen. In one very slow continuous swipe, drag your finger from the bottom left to the top right of your touchpad. How far across your screen do you get? In my case, I get only about 1/3 of the way across the diagonal. Assume I have no acceleration feature on my touchpad driver. This means I have two options to make the touchpad usable. Either (a) I can get used to dragging across the entire touchpad 3+ times to get the cursor across the screen, or (b) I can turn the touchpad speed way up. Suppose I do the latter. Now suppose my cursor is 10px away from some target and I want to hit that target with a quick movement on the touchpad. Because of the very high speed required by the previous change, my accuracy is greatly reduced. I have trouble hitting small targets with tiny movements on the touchpad. On the contrary, acceleration gets me the best of both worlds. With one quick swipe, I can get the cursor all the way across the screen. This is the "expected" behavior most people have for a laptop the first time they pick it up. On the other hand, when I'm trying to hit a small target with a slow cursor movement, I have a much easier time doing that. This feels like "enhanced precision" to your average user - the cursor moves more slowly and accurately when I need it to.
  - teekert 6y ago
    I don't know from this comment on what side of the fence you are but plugging a mouse into a mac has always felt horrible to me, like I was mousing through mud, I would always feel like the pointer slowed down too early and then I would have to reach a long way to actually get to the target. May just be my muscle memory was attuned to Windows/Linux.
    - robin_reala 6y ago
      When I used a mouse on macOS, the first thing I did was install the Microsoft mouse drivers,[1] which had Windows acceleration curves built in as an option. Unfortunately they stopped updating them beyond 10.7 Lion. Now I’ve just gone over to Apple’s trackpads for 100% of my cursor needs. [1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/1/0/B109F931-70E2-425F-8681-EAAB75845AB8/Microsoft-Mouse_d305.dmg http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/1/0/B109F931-70E2-4...
      - teekert 6y ago
        Yeah, I did the same, I always wondered if that was by design, like: "You don't need an ugly mouse next to your macbook, we'll make sure of that". But the touchpad was also indeed that good that I didn't feel I needed a mouse. Opposite on Linux/Windows where I love my external mouse. I'm a bit on the fence about what I prefer, Linux with mouse or mac with touchpad. Both (as in MacBook touchpad on my Linux laptop) would be nice...
        toast0 6y ago
        Mouse acceleration has always been different on Macs, just like font rendering, keyboard shortcuts and menu bar position. Apple is very opinionated about all the parts of User Interfaces (including inputs), it's great if you agree with their opinions.
      - olq 6y ago
        I use Steelseries ExactMouse to get rid of that odd acceleration curve. It works for any mouse brand and it still works on Mac OS 10.13, maybe newer OS'es too. https://downloads.steelseriescdn.com/drivers/tools/steelseries-exactmouse-tool.dmg https://downloads.steelseriescdn.com/drivers/tools/steelseri...
  - clarry 6y ago
    My xinitrc starts with xset m 0 0. I want input from my mouse to map 1:1 to pixels. Nothing more. (I think libinput breaks that -- or at some point did break it -- and I solve it by removing libinput. Coincidentally, I started having issues with my trackpad when someone somewhere made libinput the new default. I fixed that by removing libinput)
    - Ballas 6y ago
      I think you can still achieve the same using xinput to set the appropriate accel profile and speed. (And coordinate transformation matrix should be identity matrix)
  - bscphil 6y ago
    I'm not clear on what exactly you're advocating. If it's just pointer acceleration, Linux operating systems have that already. Every input driver I've ever used on a Linux laptop (for over a decade) has supported it. It works very well - it would be difficult to use a touchpad on a typical laptop otherwise. Is there something else you'd like to see?
  - Nursie 6y ago
    I boot between Windows and Linux every day, same hardware (logitech G703 mouse) I have never even noticed a difference, let alone registered a preference.
  - devit 6y ago
    I think it's better to simply buy a very high resolution laser mouse (which are commonplace now) and map sensor displacement to screen displacement in a trivial linear way.
    - smichel17 6y ago
      This is what I did, originally for gaming, but now I can't imagine gong back to mouse acceleration. A DPI button on the mouse lets me quickly toggle the sensitivity if I need more or less control for a particular task.
    - ubercow13 6y ago
      Yep. There is a reason why everyone plays FPS games that way, and it applies just the same to the desktop
- sprash 6y ago
  This! X11 "synaptics" driver seems to be very high quality already. Personally I really like the great amount parameters that can be tuned. Why do we need jet another duplicated effort like libinput?
  - wott 6y ago
    > Why do we need jet another duplicated effort like libinput? That's the mentality of the Freedesktop-Redhat-Gnome-Poettering-Wayland-whichever-comes-next crowd. Take a piece of software that's been working for years and fulfils pretty much every need (after a couple of decades of bug fixing and feature completing), declare it deprecated, and propose/impose a replacement that you push as 'better'. Better for what, in which way? It doesn't matter, just say it is 'modern' and the present system if a messy pile of cruft. Don't forget to make 1 or 2 blog posts which will be pasted as the definitive authoritative reference on the subject each of the 1000 time someone raises a problem with the new tool or its approach. If you want to make the tactic more efficient, first become the handler of the present system and then 'actively' stop maintaining it and refuse to add the few features that new usages may demand, so that that you can justify your claim of deprecation. Then you just have to spend 10 to 15 years getting your brand new toy to an equal condition as the former, and achieve feature parity. When you are done, the super lean and clean model you advertised 10 years before has become the same kind of old farts' mess you ranted against, sometimes more messy because you started by actively fighting against the extensibility which, according to you, was the root of all the mess in the older tool, in order to impose a clean, reduced set of functions, so you had to resort to dirty hacks to add the requested functions. After boasting the first couple of years from conference to conference, don't forget to whine all along the next decade when real and boring work and rework has to be done to reach feature parity. Then, you're finally done, pick another part of the ecosystem (that users had voluntarily picked because they like it or because it was doing the job well for their use case) and repeat the same procedure.
    - tannhaeuser 6y ago
      I believe libinput's and synaptic's maintainer is the same person, and he started libinput because the synaptic codebase was a mess without tests whatsoever. I'm also using synaptics btw, as libinput gives me physical pain ...
tapia 6y ago
What about Steam? They certainly need inputs drivers to play games.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Well I think the weakness in Linux is mostly touchpad, which isn't ready a gaming thing. I think.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - boudin 6y ago
    Libinput isn't just for touchpads though, it's an abstraction of input devices for wayland compositors (even if it's also available for Xorg).
core-questions 6y ago
Try TurboVNC - it's usable enough for me to use all day long to do typical devops things remotely. Sure, there's a little input lag, but by and large it does a good job. There's multimonitor and OpenGL acceleration in there now, too.
fest 6y ago
> Especially when remote desktop on Linux is not very good. (I've only used VNC and XRDP) not to mention a lot of extra packages. You mean using linux to connect to remote PCs? What are the issues you are facing? I've been happily using remmina (it does use something else for the actual RDP connection IIRC) on Ubuntu to connect to headless Windows box via RDP for CAD/ECAD work for the last year or so. The windows box is in local gigabit network though.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Oh no the other way around. Having a remote Linux box that I want to get a remote desktop into. Remmina is really good, I agree.
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    Back then I simply used x forwarding from ssh. It felt snappy and native enough, assuming your bandwidth and latency is good enough.
- jamesfmilne 6y ago
  Try NoMachine or Teradici, both of these are getting a lot of use in Film & TV post production where are alot of artists work on Linux workstations running Nuke or Flame or Baselight.
- azalemeth 6y ago
  ThinLinc is freeware for most small users; it is good enough for 3D design work (think Blender) on the remote Linux host and has multiplatform clients. It's a modified version of turbovnc with, imo, a moderately enlightened company behind it.
uluyol 6y ago
I have used NX for this in the past.
kbumsik 6y ago
Also there is a serious problem: It is often not fun at all. Abstracting hardware as an open-source API is definitely a more painful job then other kind of projects like a web project. It's because you have absolutely no control over how the hardware works, and each hardware vendors work differently. The worst moment is when the maintainer receives a reaction like this: "Oh it doesn't work on my hardware. Plz fix it". How the hell to fix it when the maintainer doesn't have the hardware? But there are people complain and criticize that the maintainer doesn't do the job for them. You can easily see these kinds of cases in desktop related project like Sway Wayland compositor. (mainly because of Nvidia of course.)
- LeonM 6y ago
  > It's because you have absolutely no control over how the hardware works, and each hardware vendors work differently. Replace 'hardware' with 'browser' and you are in the same situation. As someone with a degree in embedded systems engineering, I have a lot more sympathy for hardware quirks than browser quirks. Hardware can't easily be updated, browsers can. > It is often not fun at all. I'd rather spend weeks researching a hardware bug than spending hours on SO to find CSS hacks to make some browser render my page properly.
  - kbumsik 6y ago
    > I'd rather spend weeks researching a hardware bug I would too, but only if it is my hardware. But for other guy's hardware who want to use your project? I will loose an interest if it is a free job. At least web browsers work in the same way in many cases. Of course there are some cross-browser incompatibilities but workarounds are not as hard as hardware.

by Jonnax 6y ago

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

Its probably also because people are motivated to help out when they see work to be done. For me, my mouse and trackpad work just fine. I don't even know what I could work on with such a project. It all just works.

wang_li 6y ago
Go read Microsoft's mouse ballistics from way back, if you can find it, then use a mouse on any Windows desktop since XP for a week. Then come back and try a Linux or Mac with an actual mouse instead of a touchpad. You can fix that. It's here: https://web.archive.org/web/20101222190833/http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/pointer-bal.mspx https://web.archive.org/web/20101222190833/http://www.micros...
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  Please, god no. If anybody really does implement this, at least be kind enough to leave the old behaviour behind a configuration switch.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  This is the single worst input decision ms has ever made. The first thing you do is to turn that hellish thing of.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Windows has by far the best mouse input of any OS. What exactly do you want to turn off?
    - badsectoracula 6y ago
      The acceleration (aka ballistics). I want 1:1 mapping of mouse motion to cursor. It is easy to disable on Windows though, just uncheck the "Enhance pointer precision" (award for the most misleading title because it actually makes precision worse). It is annoying in other OSes that you have to jump through hoops to disable that stuff.
      - bscphil 6y ago
        > "Enhance pointer precision" (award for the most misleading title because it actually makes precision worse) I would argue that it does enhance the precision if it's correctly implemented. (I haven't used Windows in a decade, so I can't comment on that point.) Example: on a laptop, move the cursor to the bottom left corner of the screen. In one very slow continuous swipe, drag your finger from the bottom left to the top right of your touchpad. How far across your screen do you get? In my case, I get only about 1/3 of the way across the diagonal. Assume I have no acceleration feature on my touchpad driver. This means I have two options to make the touchpad usable. Either (a) I can get used to dragging across the entire touchpad 3+ times to get the cursor across the screen, or (b) I can turn the touchpad speed way up. Suppose I do the latter. Now suppose my cursor is 10px away from some target and I want to hit that target with a quick movement on the touchpad. Because of the very high speed required by the previous change, my accuracy is greatly reduced. I have trouble hitting small targets with tiny movements on the touchpad. On the contrary, acceleration gets me the best of both worlds. With one quick swipe, I can get the cursor all the way across the screen. This is the "expected" behavior most people have for a laptop the first time they pick it up. On the other hand, when I'm trying to hit a small target with a slow cursor movement, I have a much easier time doing that. This feels like "enhanced precision" to your average user - the cursor moves more slowly and accurately when I need it to.
- teekert 6y ago
  I don't know from this comment on what side of the fence you are but plugging a mouse into a mac has always felt horrible to me, like I was mousing through mud, I would always feel like the pointer slowed down too early and then I would have to reach a long way to actually get to the target. May just be my muscle memory was attuned to Windows/Linux.
  - robin_reala 6y ago
    When I used a mouse on macOS, the first thing I did was install the Microsoft mouse drivers,[1] which had Windows acceleration curves built in as an option. Unfortunately they stopped updating them beyond 10.7 Lion. Now I’ve just gone over to Apple’s trackpads for 100% of my cursor needs. [1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/1/0/B109F931-70E2-425F-8681-EAAB75845AB8/Microsoft-Mouse_d305.dmg http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/1/0/B109F931-70E2-4...
    - teekert 6y ago
      Yeah, I did the same, I always wondered if that was by design, like: "You don't need an ugly mouse next to your macbook, we'll make sure of that". But the touchpad was also indeed that good that I didn't feel I needed a mouse. Opposite on Linux/Windows where I love my external mouse. I'm a bit on the fence about what I prefer, Linux with mouse or mac with touchpad. Both (as in MacBook touchpad on my Linux laptop) would be nice...
      - toast0 6y ago
        Mouse acceleration has always been different on Macs, just like font rendering, keyboard shortcuts and menu bar position. Apple is very opinionated about all the parts of User Interfaces (including inputs), it's great if you agree with their opinions.
    - olq 6y ago
      I use Steelseries ExactMouse to get rid of that odd acceleration curve. It works for any mouse brand and it still works on Mac OS 10.13, maybe newer OS'es too. https://downloads.steelseriescdn.com/drivers/tools/steelseries-exactmouse-tool.dmg https://downloads.steelseriescdn.com/drivers/tools/steelseri...
- clarry 6y ago
  My xinitrc starts with xset m 0 0. I want input from my mouse to map 1:1 to pixels. Nothing more. (I think libinput breaks that -- or at some point did break it -- and I solve it by removing libinput. Coincidentally, I started having issues with my trackpad when someone somewhere made libinput the new default. I fixed that by removing libinput)
  - Ballas 6y ago
    I think you can still achieve the same using xinput to set the appropriate accel profile and speed. (And coordinate transformation matrix should be identity matrix)
- bscphil 6y ago
  I'm not clear on what exactly you're advocating. If it's just pointer acceleration, Linux operating systems have that already. Every input driver I've ever used on a Linux laptop (for over a decade) has supported it. It works very well - it would be difficult to use a touchpad on a typical laptop otherwise. Is there something else you'd like to see?
- Nursie 6y ago
  I boot between Windows and Linux every day, same hardware (logitech G703 mouse) I have never even noticed a difference, let alone registered a preference.
- devit 6y ago
  I think it's better to simply buy a very high resolution laser mouse (which are commonplace now) and map sensor displacement to screen displacement in a trivial linear way.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    This is what I did, originally for gaming, but now I can't imagine gong back to mouse acceleration. A DPI button on the mouse lets me quickly toggle the sensitivity if I need more or less control for a particular task.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Yep. There is a reason why everyone plays FPS games that way, and it applies just the same to the desktop
sprash 6y ago
This! X11 "synaptics" driver seems to be very high quality already. Personally I really like the great amount parameters that can be tuned. Why do we need jet another duplicated effort like libinput?
- wott 6y ago
  > Why do we need jet another duplicated effort like libinput? That's the mentality of the Freedesktop-Redhat-Gnome-Poettering-Wayland-whichever-comes-next crowd. Take a piece of software that's been working for years and fulfils pretty much every need (after a couple of decades of bug fixing and feature completing), declare it deprecated, and propose/impose a replacement that you push as 'better'. Better for what, in which way? It doesn't matter, just say it is 'modern' and the present system if a messy pile of cruft. Don't forget to make 1 or 2 blog posts which will be pasted as the definitive authoritative reference on the subject each of the 1000 time someone raises a problem with the new tool or its approach. If you want to make the tactic more efficient, first become the handler of the present system and then 'actively' stop maintaining it and refuse to add the few features that new usages may demand, so that that you can justify your claim of deprecation. Then you just have to spend 10 to 15 years getting your brand new toy to an equal condition as the former, and achieve feature parity. When you are done, the super lean and clean model you advertised 10 years before has become the same kind of old farts' mess you ranted against, sometimes more messy because you started by actively fighting against the extensibility which, according to you, was the root of all the mess in the older tool, in order to impose a clean, reduced set of functions, so you had to resort to dirty hacks to add the requested functions. After boasting the first couple of years from conference to conference, don't forget to whine all along the next decade when real and boring work and rework has to be done to reach feature parity. Then, you're finally done, pick another part of the ecosystem (that users had voluntarily picked because they like it or because it was doing the job well for their use case) and repeat the same procedure.
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    I believe libinput's and synaptic's maintainer is the same person, and he started libinput because the synaptic codebase was a mess without tests whatsoever. I'm also using synaptics btw, as libinput gives me physical pain ...

tapia 6y ago

What about Steam? They certainly need inputs drivers to play games.

Jonnax 6y ago
Well I think the weakness in Linux is mostly touchpad, which isn't ready a gaming thing. I think.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- boudin 6y ago
  Libinput isn't just for touchpads though, it's an abstraction of input devices for wayland compositors (even if it's also available for Xorg).

core-questions 6y ago

Try TurboVNC - it's usable enough for me to use all day long to do typical devops things remotely. Sure, there's a little input lag, but by and large it does a good job. There's multimonitor and OpenGL acceleration in there now, too.

fest 6y ago

> Especially when remote desktop on Linux is not very good. (I've only used VNC and XRDP) not to mention a lot of extra packages. You mean using linux to connect to remote PCs? What are the issues you are facing? I've been happily using remmina (it does use something else for the actual RDP connection IIRC) on Ubuntu to connect to headless Windows box via RDP for CAD/ECAD work for the last year or so. The windows box is in local gigabit network though.

Jonnax 6y ago
Oh no the other way around. Having a remote Linux box that I want to get a remote desktop into. Remmina is really good, I agree.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Back then I simply used x forwarding from ssh. It felt snappy and native enough, assuming your bandwidth and latency is good enough.
jamesfmilne 6y ago
Try NoMachine or Teradici, both of these are getting a lot of use in Film & TV post production where are alot of artists work on Linux workstations running Nuke or Flame or Baselight.
azalemeth 6y ago
ThinLinc is freeware for most small users; it is good enough for 3D design work (think Blender) on the remote Linux host and has multiplatform clients. It's a modified version of turbovnc with, imo, a moderately enlightened company behind it.

uluyol 6y ago

I have used NX for this in the past.

kbumsik 6y ago

Also there is a serious problem: It is often not fun at all. Abstracting hardware as an open-source API is definitely a more painful job then other kind of projects like a web project. It's because you have absolutely no control over how the hardware works, and each hardware vendors work differently. The worst moment is when the maintainer receives a reaction like this: "Oh it doesn't work on my hardware. Plz fix it". How the hell to fix it when the maintainer doesn't have the hardware? But there are people complain and criticize that the maintainer doesn't do the job for them. You can easily see these kinds of cases in desktop related project like Sway Wayland compositor. (mainly because of Nvidia of course.)

LeonM 6y ago
> It's because you have absolutely no control over how the hardware works, and each hardware vendors work differently. Replace 'hardware' with 'browser' and you are in the same situation. As someone with a degree in embedded systems engineering, I have a lot more sympathy for hardware quirks than browser quirks. Hardware can't easily be updated, browsers can. > It is often not fun at all. I'd rather spend weeks researching a hardware bug than spending hours on SO to find CSS hacks to make some browser render my page properly.
- kbumsik 6y ago
  > I'd rather spend weeks researching a hardware bug I would too, but only if it is my hardware. But for other guy's hardware who want to use your project? I will loose an interest if it is a free job. At least web browsers work in the same way in many cases. Of course there are some cross-browser incompatibilities but workarounds are not as hard as hardware.