13 ms·

Linux Touchpad Like a MacBook update: progress on multitouch

270 points by wbharding 6y ago

ah- 6y ago
Woo! Amazing progress, and great to see the sensible approach. Well done Povilas and Bill.
geerlingguy 6y ago
After trying out my Magic Trackpad on Pi OS a couple weeks ago, and finding that experience to be somewhat frustrating, I found out about this project and immediately sponsored it. Even on Windows, trackpad support with my giant Apple trackpad is pretty good. On Linux (at least with Pi OS and XFCE) I couldn't figure out how to get it to have any good acceleration curve or work at all like on my Mac or Windows laptop. Scrolling was pretty smooth, but the cursor control was all over the place, so I had to pull out an old mouse for that day.
- dhosek 6y ago
  This is one of those things that mark where the Linux desktop experience falls short. I've been a trackpad user since 1997 when I bought a keyboard with a built-in trackpad for my home-built OS/2 system, and the superiority of the experience on Apple hardware has been a significant factor in why I've stuck with Apple as my primary OS since 2001. I've occasionally had to use Windows for work since then and the trackpad experience has gone from unusable to acceptable but it still hasn't caught up to the Mac and Linux hasn't caught up to Windows.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    I've been using trackpads since Cirque launched the GlidePoint, using it first in OS/2 and later in Linux. I have never had problems with these things other than the touch surface wearing through, the things generally 'just work'. I tend to increase the acceleration factor so I can move from left to right in one fell sweep, use two-finger scroll, touch-to-click and sometimes double- and triple-touch to click for button 2 and 3. What are these problems I keep on hearing Apple aficionados talk about which make life on Linux unbearable? Is it fancy gestures? If so, there's tools for that. Is is the size of the pad? Well, just use a bigger one. For me it just works so I don't understand what the problems are, all I read is that 'the experience is bad' and similarly subjective claims. Can you give some objective examples where a Linux-based desktop fails to live up to expectations related to trackpad support?
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  I've been using a 'magic trackpad' for years now, it is the only piece of Apple-branded equipment I ever bought (by getting it for cheap from the 'net), in Linux, and have not had any problems with acceleration curves or cursor control. It use it with 1/2/3 finger click gestures to substitute for the lack of those other buttons. I configure the thing through xinput since I'm not using a 'desktop environment' (Xmonad, dzen, dmenu, conky and trayer suffice). What are those terrible problems which made you pull out your mouse again?
kitotik 6y ago
With such limited resources, I wonder if just targeting wayland initially would get usable results faster.
- e12e 6y ago
  Seeing as how multi-touch generally works (at the display server level in Wayland) - I think a backoort to xorg makes sense - it aligns incentives for maintainers to test and improve support in toolkits and applications.
- pantalaimon 6y ago
  Most users are on Xorg, so this will have the most impact. There is also no single Wayland compositor they could focus on.
  - vertex-four 6y ago
    There are, in practice, 3 that anyone cares about - GNOME’s, KDE’s, and wlroots. I don’t know how much of their work is potentially portable across the three. But while most users are currently on Xorg, the work going into improving responsiveness and suchlike is all going into Wayland. This project is really putting lipstick on a pig.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Also, compositors don't really need much improvement in this area, everything has been done ages ago. It's all about the toolkits, and some great work is happening in GTK, e.g.: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1562 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1562 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117
modzu 6y ago
wait, what? so if they are ignoring wayland wont default ubuntu users on gnome not get these benefits? seems odd to do all the surveys and research but not actually check what distro/compositor respondents use?
- favadi 6y ago
  Ubuntu, as of 20.04, is using X by default.
- nomadluap 6y ago
  from the article, apparently Wayland display servers already support multi-touch gestures.
sly010 6y ago
One of the difficulties of working on any improvement in the free-desktop ecosystem is the difficulty involved in getting everybody on the same page. It's interesting to realize that the chops required to write the code is not necessarily the same as the experience required to push a project to completion. This of course shouldn't be surprising, the product management role is present in every high performing organization, what's surprising is that it's taking so long for the open source ecosystem to realize the importance of this.
hajile 6y ago
My pixelbook touchpad works incredibly well (better than a macbook IMO). Is there any way that work can be integrated into this project?
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Also using a Pixelbook here. Interestingly last time I had to reboot for update it spent a long time reprogramming the firmware in the touchpad. I wonder if this means that Google develops the touchpad firmware or if they just ship vendor firmware. Either way, I agree it works perfectly and the correspondence between my gesture and the animation of the display is perfect.
- Onyros 6y ago
  It's so smooth, the lack of lag when you're scrolling is just perfect. The hardware helps, of course, but I have the same smooth scrolling on very dated hardware to which I installed Chrome OS, too.
agurk 6y ago
I was impressed with the momentum this project has been building and was just about to sign up to become a sponsor. Reading the update though shows their current focus on X.Org - as an otherwise happy Wayland (Mutter) user I'm going to hold off supporting this until they start making changes that will benefit me.
- e12e 6y ago
  With support for both Wayland and xorg, improving support in toolkits and applications make more sense, though.
- leadingthenet 6y ago
  Same here. I’ve already been supporting to this project, but seeing how xorg is going to be their focus for potentially many months from now, I am debating whether to keep my contribution up.
- p12tic 6y ago
  Povilas from the linked article. It's not obvious, but adding touchpad gesture support to X will benefit you too even if you're not using X. This will make our work of convincing the maintainers of other open source projects much easier. X and Wayland cover essentially al Linux users, so we will not need to estimate how many users will benefit from implementing gesture support in toolkit X or application Y. This is really important, because maintainers of open source projects don't usually care about suggested features if they're not interested in them themselves. A new feature means additional work to them - discussing the design, reviewing PRs and handling of eventual bugs. Often the person who implements a feature disappears after the PR is merged. This makes the maintainers to view all feature proposals with a grain of salt. We need to have a convincing story of how majority end users would benefit in order to make the contributions easier.
  - modzu 6y ago
    i dont follow..
    - 6y ago
hootbootscoot 6y ago
I'm still stuck on default trackpad Y-scroll direction under Linux. I've done some hacky input stream filter fix, but it's not working in ALL applications. (dunno why...don't really care...) I STILL feel uncomfortable using my thinkpad scrollpad in geany under linux, as it jumps and the scrolling isn't clearly indicating (through some animations i gather?) scrolling direction when I drag 2 fingers up and down... Multi-touch, great! ...I just feel like basic behavior still appears to be an anti-intuitive, if admittedly equally logically viable (swiping the paper up or down vs swiping the scrollbar, metaphorically speaking)
- 6AA4FD 6y ago
  Could be wayland/xwayland if you're using that. My first thought.
  - hootbootscoot 6y ago
    thanks for the helpful tip! but alas, I'm still on Xorg
grawprog 6y ago
I'm curious how this will compare with https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma/blob/master/README.md I've also personally been using multitouch zooming and scrolling in kde for years now. It will be cool to see a simplified, 'just working', desktop independent multitouch system for linux though.
- ah- 6y ago
  With full gesture support we'll hopefully get more interactivity, so e.g. if you switch workspaces with a four finger drag it moves as you perform the gesture and stops if you stop moving your fingers. fusuma seems to only recognise the gesture and then run a command afterwards.
  - thinkbud 6y ago
    Exactly, gestures without interactivity are honestly not worth it in my opinion.
    - shaan7 6y ago
      Depends on what "not worth it" means really. Even though gestures minus interactivity is far from how "proper" gestures feel, I'd rather have something rather than nothing (for example, it is still more convenient to 3-finger swipe to switch virtual desktop than a keyboard shortcut or clicking a button).
      - thinkbud 6y ago
        Ok, I admit that "not worth it" is better rephrased as "not the end goal". If the end goal is interactive gestures, one-off discrete gestures are welcome as an intermediate step or halfway solution. Ideally the input framework would know if the streamed gesture was consumed real-time, and if not (e.g. no support for such interactice gesture in some program), the one-off event is issued. This reminds me of current xorg libinput two finger scrolling / wheel event. Xinput2 is the relevant keyword but I am not sure exactly how it all fits in, only what I can observe: - applications that don't know about multi finger scroll/pan listen for and accept classic mouse4 / mouse5 events and interpret them to scroll in steps if relevant. As an example, xev x event testing uility is not xinput2 aware AFAIK nor are classic x or older gtk programs - applications can be xinput2-aware (e.g. eog Eye of Gnome image viewer, but maybe also any non-ancient gtk3 application as well), in which case they can scroll more directly (pixel-smooth) and with appropriate acceleration / smoothing / inertia (gtk-specific ?). In firefox there's an env var like MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 which tells firefox it can do this smoother wheel handling, not sure if it's required or automatic these days. To test received events including xinput2, there is utility xinput --test-xi2 As a closing anecdote, there's an interesting interaction bug I have experienced with xfce where both xfwm will react to Super+scroll (compositor-level full screen zoom), and the application under the mouse pointer will also react to the scroll up/down. I have not deciphered the interactions here but it depends on app under mouse cursor...
thinkbud 6y ago
Honestly the write up seems ok but does not evoke optimism to me. I can't help it but to me macOS and it's multifinger gesture support is not about how many gestures it supports or which actions it supports, but the fluidity of the execution of gestures with animations. When you start pinching/unpinching fingers apart, the zoom happens in sync with your finger spacing. As soon as you start pinching, the application seems to receive with the event stream all the x and y coordinates so that pan and zoom can be done simultaneously in lockstep with the finger positions and spacing on the touch pad. Similarly when you pull 2 or 3 fingers from the side to e.g. go back a page, the reveal animation starts, or an arrow appears, and you can change your mind mid gesture by reversing the finger movement and the animation feedback is helpful enough to tell you that indeed the gesture will be canceled. I honestly hope that the developers interested in improving this in libinput and stack have the same understanding that gestures are not about recognizing the one-off side/pinch movement with a couple of fingers, but about low latency fluid interaction of fingers with visual animation feedback tightly coupled. The other (one-off) type of gestures where you swipe your three fingers to the left and then after a sampling interval the framework or stack receives a ThreeFingersLeft swipe event (with length or time or xy values) is IMO a very underwhelming experience.
- CountSessine 6y ago
  I’m a long time MBP user who’s switched to Linux on a thinkpad recently, after the butterfly switch debacle. I think the one gesture I used more than any other on my MBP was the 4-finger swipe left and right to switch workspaces. I would have a fullscreen iterm/tmux/vim session in each workspace - each tmux is a separate project with multiple panes and windows. I can't really bind a keyboard shortcut to switch workspaces because I have so many shortcuts already bound to tmux/vim/coc and other vim extensions, which is why it's so nice to be able to switch workspaces with a touchpad gesture. I could flip back and forth between workspaces effortlessly, without losing precious key shortcuts for development. It’s a fantastic dev setup. Fedora 32 seems to support this now! I don’t think that F31 did, but on F32 I can do the 4 finger swipe to switch workspaces, and on my thinkpad it works pretty much as smoothly and as interactively as it did on my MBP - swipe slowly and the screen slides following your fingers, change direction in the middle of the gesture and the screen slides back - the whole ‘stream input events and the screen is an extension of your fingers’ as you describe. The Linux desktop is getting a lot better. I don’t think I would ever have switched without Wayland and now they’re getting gestures right.
kerkeslager 6y ago
The touchpads on Macs are, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages they have. It's not just multitouch, it's also the sensitivity, the clarity between clicks and scrolling, and the general responsiveness of it. Force clicks are one exception: when I force click it's almost always by accident and I have never found a situation where force click was tied to useful functionality.
- xrisk 6y ago
  I think force click to look up the dictionary is useful, but that's pretty much it.
  - sosborn 6y ago
    I set up my dictionary lookups to be done with a three-finger tap. Much easier.
  - exprez135 6y ago
    My Catalina install broke the dictionary app for me, so there are no dictionaries other than Wikipedia. This was one of the most useful features of force touch for me :(
    - LeoPanthera 6y ago
      You can reinstall macOS without erasing your data or apps. Maybe give that a try. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904
  - raybb 6y ago
    today I learned why my computer so often pops up the dictionary for no clear reason
- ragnese 6y ago
  I use a mac for work and have definitely spent some significant time working with it as an actual laptop. I really do appreciate the smooth scroll physics. But I really can't figure out why every raves about the gestures. I only ever trigger them by accident. I think I eventually turned them off, but only after screwing up a few times and thinking that I might some day actually want to use them.
habitue 6y ago
It sounds like no matter how much money is put into this, the sheer variety in how graphics are done on linux is going to make this a neverending task. Others have rightfully mentioned that the syncing animations with the trackpad is the big thing that makes the experience better, and even with Wayland, you're talking about interacting with both the window system and the compositor, both of which can be different. I'm not a huge fan of apple, but these kinds of small details are basically impossible to get right unless you've spent decades relentlessly deprecating old apis and consolidating them so there's only one fish in the barrel to shoot.
- bluedays 6y ago
  Since we can't see the source for MacOS or Windows we can't judge whether or not these are the same challenges that they also faced. Aside from the different display server protocols the challenges may not be unique to Linux. Perhaps the money that went into supporting this feature allowed them to overcome these challenges with much more ease. Unless someone who is more familiar with the source of MacOS can clarify otherwise I think it would be safe to say that this is not a new challenge, perse. Just new to Linux.
ZeroCool2u 6y ago
Damn. This is the first open source project I've ever sponsored and been really excited about sponsoring. However, I've been using Ubuntu on Wayland for the past 2 years and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Frankly, I'm not willing to move back to X and it seems like a step backwards to me to invest any time, effort, or money in X at this point, so I'm going to discontinue my contribution. I was hoping my monetary contribution would be a small ($25/Month) way to push Wayland forward, but the approach Bill and Povilas are taking is doing exactly the opposite by making it more comfortable for folks to stick with X. I understand there is disagreement and apprehension among the community with the slow move to Wayland, perhaps not at the same scale of systemd, but I firmly believe it's the best path forward and that X should be left behind.
- 1_player 6y ago
  That's unfortunate. AFAIK GTK4 will be Wayland-only and out in a few months, and some bleeding edge distros such as Fedora already run Wayland out of the box, except if you have NVIDIA, because Xwayland is still crap under nv; but not for long, apparently there's some rumours and intention to improve the nv/xwayland situation, just nothing concrete out yet [1]. So yeah, betting on Xorg in 2020 is not a smart move IMO. 1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Generic-Allocator-2019 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G...
  - new_realist 6y ago
    Distros keep trying to move to Wayland and then keep coming back to X11 due to usability. GTK4 is not going to help that.
  - p12tic 6y ago
    > AFAIK GTK4 will be Wayland-only and out in a few months I think this is incorrect. See the following, X11 backend is listed among supported backends. https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/stable/extra-configuration-options.html#id-1.9.2.6.7 https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/stable/extra-configuration-...
- p12tic 6y ago
urbeanplayed 6y ago
As a long-time Linux on desktop user and tweaker, an early adopter of libinput under X, and an early adopter of Wayland, a historied-user of MBPs with nice touchpads, and Chromebook Pixels with glass touchpads, I just don't get it. There's still very little concrete information here that gives points to any solid net improvement for anyone using a modern Linux desktop (aka Wayland+libinput, which already support all of the original goals of this project). If you read the first two blog updates, they're straight out of FAANG PM-speak land. I can just hear the words echoing from a PM who vaguely understands an amalgamation of customer wants, without having any of the technical context of actual customer needs, architectural limitations, alternatives, etc. And this is exemplified in the nearly useless survey data. It is so poorly sliced, and presented that it's hard to know what was learned. There's no axis for X/Wayland, which X input driver was used, what DEs were used, etc. All of these significantly matter in the day-to-day feel of the touchpad considering how libinput is configured. Frankly, and this blog post more or less implies it, Wayland and libinput address nearly all of the original goals, and the ways in which they don't are either bugs in the drivers/libinput quirks that should be filled and fixed in libinput, or are simply the choices of GTK/Qt toolkits or DE designers and are part of a bigger design discussion that could help establish better defaults across toolkits+DEs. I just don't see why people are putting their hopes or money on this project. I don't see current, useful-to-Wayland problems being identified or worked on. Finally, a tip, for wayland + gestures, consider `gebaar-libinput`. And a solid net improvement to libinput (and up the stack) would be "stop scroll events". It's the only thing keeping the scrolling experience in Firefox+wayland+webrender from feeling just as good as Safari on a MBP.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
Double Tap to Zoom. That's literally the only thing I desperately miss from my touchpad on linux. If anyone knows of a way to get this on linux, please let me know I'd be ever grateful.
- ghostpepper 6y ago
  In case anyone is unfamiliar, on a mac in chrome or safari (not firefox for some reason) on any article, a double tap with two fingers on any row of text will smoothly zoom the page so the text takes up the exact width of the window - effectively hiding the margins while preserving the formatting of the text (ie. not reflowing the text)
derefr 6y ago
How does Android do multi-touch? How do Chromebooks? Is none of that work portable?
sitkack 6y ago
The focus on multi-touch gestures is missing the forest for the trees. If you look at the all of the next highest rated "features" they are not features but bugs. The reason that mac touchpads are so nice to use has _nothing_ to do with multitouch and everything to do with palm rejection, filtering, etc. It is a hard problem, analogous to and more difficult than writing multicopter flight control software. Having looked at the trackpad code, and fixing (in a very hacky way) some of the issues I was having, I have zero expectation that Linux laptops will get a mac like experience in the next couple years. Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political. Trackpad software and cut and paste are the two largest detractors for desktop Linux.
- ragnese 6y ago
  Could you elaborate a bit on the technical vs. political aspect at play here? I was kind of just assuming that the trackpad issue might have been, at least partly, because the hardware macs use for trackpads was special. Are you saying that's not the case? Also, what about cut and paste??
- ssivark 6y ago
  > Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political. Could you explain how/why? Is it about specializing in specific hardware/firmware?
  - p12tic 6y ago
    Povilas from the linked blog here. In open source often no one really cares about a suggested feature or even a submitted pull requests. It means additional work for the project maintainers - discussing design, reviewing code and handling of eventual bug fixes. Often the person who made a PR disappears leaving all future bugs the problem of the maintainer. So naturally project maintainers are risk averse and often say no to new features. Things end up not being implemented, not because it's technically difficult, or there's nobody willing to do the work, but because the incentives don't align. The above opinion applies to open source in general as I've witnessed during the past decade. I'm not describing any projects that are related touchpad or input that I've been interacting with lately.
MayeulC 6y ago
Unsure why the blog article itself is in an iframe? https://public.amplenote.com/embed/TnE3JJDDy5QDo5aZAYtqyHz4?hostname=bill.harding.blog https://public.amplenote.com/embed/TnE3JJDDy5QDo5aZAYtqyHz4?... This plan has also has a huge flaw, that can be shortened to one letter: X. > Add gesture support to the Xorg display server > A "fun" fact: if all of this work was already done today, it would appear on Ubuntu as of next April's release. I'm betting you a drink that next April's release won't have an updated X server package. I haven't been following ubuntu packaging too closely, but last major x.org release was in 2018, and the next one hasn't been discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server#Releases I expect Wayland to be the default on even more systems by then, maybe even KDE could default to it? Though Qt has been weighting them down with the transition, there are less and less rough edges remaining. So, this is probably going the hard way, for little at the end. It sounds like it caters more to the author's system configuration of choice (well, it's their money, though not really). As the author said, Wayland has most of the bits in place, we mostly need to tweak toolkits into supporting this (Qt, SDL, wx, fltk, Gtk?, etc). Starting there would lead early results, and the code path might be reusable is X is worth implementing later. On the other hand, X.org probably nears its final release, so if you want it to be burried with multitouch support, it's probably a good strategy to hurry. Let's see who is left in the X ecosystem: * GNOME: moved on to wayland, mostly, though strangely not with Ubuntu * KDE: moving along, a lot needs to be done in Qt * i3: sway is mostly compatible and quite nice to use (typing this there) * XFCE/LXDE: not sure, I think the projects have merged into LxQt, which has wayland support comming along. XFCE itself meanwhile doesn't have a timeline for wayland, but I think it's on the horizon * Openbox/fluxbox/Windowmaker: you're probably not into wayland. But there's a myriad of Wayland compositors that caters to the same * firefox: starts to work quite nicely, has hw-accelerated video decoding now under wayland. * Inkscape: supports it as of the 1.0 release * Gimp: On the roadmap for 3.0 with the GTK3 port (same situation as Inkscape) Tablet support is here (mostly), network transparency now has an alternative, albeit quite young, with waypipe ("network transparency" has never been a fundamental issue with Wayland, waypipe was bound to happen, I expect a lot more rough edges will disappear once 90% of the users are on Wayland). The missing pieces of the puzzle now are probably xdg-desktop-portal+pipewire support in the web browsers, that I often see people complaining about (and GNOME having their own screenshot interface doesn't help). That is coming. And the last piece, unified color correction with HDR support, I don't know that much about it to comment, but I've at least seen some work on HDR support for sway.
noiv 6y ago
I'm on Ubuntu Gnome with touchegg and use three finger up/down for workspaces and three finger left/right for the history in browser and Nautilus. There's even a gesture to toggle tabs in Firefox like ctrl-tab. It's not as smooth as a Mac, but still better than Windows :)
Onyros 6y ago
I would settle for Chrome OS-like touchpad smoothness and gestures in Linux. The out-of-the-box touchpad sensitivity and scroll smoothness in Chromebooks with outdated hardware and something as low-end and old as an a Celeron N2840 is incomparable to anything I've ever managed to configure in Linux, multifinger gestures included.
dang 6y ago
Recent threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515

270 points by wbharding 6y ago

ah- 6y ago

Woo! Amazing progress, and great to see the sensible approach. Well done Povilas and Bill.

After trying out my Magic Trackpad on Pi OS a couple weeks ago, and finding that experience to be somewhat frustrating, I found out about this project and immediately sponsored it. Even on Windows, trackpad support with my giant Apple trackpad is pretty good. On Linux (at least with Pi OS and XFCE) I couldn't figure out how to get it to have any good acceleration curve or work at all like on my Mac or Windows laptop. Scrolling was pretty smooth, but the cursor control was all over the place, so I had to pull out an old mouse for that day.

dhosek 6y ago
This is one of those things that mark where the Linux desktop experience falls short. I've been a trackpad user since 1997 when I bought a keyboard with a built-in trackpad for my home-built OS/2 system, and the superiority of the experience on Apple hardware has been a significant factor in why I've stuck with Apple as my primary OS since 2001. I've occasionally had to use Windows for work since then and the trackpad experience has gone from unusable to acceptable but it still hasn't caught up to the Mac and Linux hasn't caught up to Windows.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  I've been using trackpads since Cirque launched the GlidePoint, using it first in OS/2 and later in Linux. I have never had problems with these things other than the touch surface wearing through, the things generally 'just work'. I tend to increase the acceleration factor so I can move from left to right in one fell sweep, use two-finger scroll, touch-to-click and sometimes double- and triple-touch to click for button 2 and 3. What are these problems I keep on hearing Apple aficionados talk about which make life on Linux unbearable? Is it fancy gestures? If so, there's tools for that. Is is the size of the pad? Well, just use a bigger one. For me it just works so I don't understand what the problems are, all I read is that 'the experience is bad' and similarly subjective claims. Can you give some objective examples where a Linux-based desktop fails to live up to expectations related to trackpad support?
Yetanfou 6y ago
I've been using a 'magic trackpad' for years now, it is the only piece of Apple-branded equipment I ever bought (by getting it for cheap from the 'net), in Linux, and have not had any problems with acceleration curves or cursor control. It use it with 1/2/3 finger click gestures to substitute for the lack of those other buttons. I configure the thing through xinput since I'm not using a 'desktop environment' (Xmonad, dzen, dmenu, conky and trayer suffice). What are those terrible problems which made you pull out your mouse again?

kitotik 6y ago

With such limited resources, I wonder if just targeting wayland initially would get usable results faster.

e12e 6y ago
Seeing as how multi-touch generally works (at the display server level in Wayland) - I think a backoort to xorg makes sense - it aligns incentives for maintainers to test and improve support in toolkits and applications.
pantalaimon 6y ago
Most users are on Xorg, so this will have the most impact. There is also no single Wayland compositor they could focus on.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  There are, in practice, 3 that anyone cares about - GNOME’s, KDE’s, and wlroots. I don’t know how much of their work is potentially portable across the three. But while most users are currently on Xorg, the work going into improving responsiveness and suchlike is all going into Wayland. This project is really putting lipstick on a pig.
  - floatboth 6y ago
    Also, compositors don't really need much improvement in this area, everything has been done ages ago. It's all about the toolkits, and some great work is happening in GTK, e.g.: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1562 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1562 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117

modzu 6y ago

wait, what? so if they are ignoring wayland wont default ubuntu users on gnome not get these benefits? seems odd to do all the surveys and research but not actually check what distro/compositor respondents use?

favadi 6y ago
Ubuntu, as of 20.04, is using X by default.
nomadluap 6y ago
from the article, apparently Wayland display servers already support multi-touch gestures.

sly010 6y ago

One of the difficulties of working on any improvement in the free-desktop ecosystem is the difficulty involved in getting everybody on the same page. It's interesting to realize that the chops required to write the code is not necessarily the same as the experience required to push a project to completion. This of course shouldn't be surprising, the product management role is present in every high performing organization, what's surprising is that it's taking so long for the open source ecosystem to realize the importance of this.

hajile 6y ago

My pixelbook touchpad works incredibly well (better than a macbook IMO). Is there any way that work can be integrated into this project?

jeffbee 6y ago
Also using a Pixelbook here. Interestingly last time I had to reboot for update it spent a long time reprogramming the firmware in the touchpad. I wonder if this means that Google develops the touchpad firmware or if they just ship vendor firmware. Either way, I agree it works perfectly and the correspondence between my gesture and the animation of the display is perfect.
Onyros 6y ago
It's so smooth, the lack of lag when you're scrolling is just perfect. The hardware helps, of course, but I have the same smooth scrolling on very dated hardware to which I installed Chrome OS, too.

agurk 6y ago

I was impressed with the momentum this project has been building and was just about to sign up to become a sponsor. Reading the update though shows their current focus on X.Org - as an otherwise happy Wayland (Mutter) user I'm going to hold off supporting this until they start making changes that will benefit me.

e12e 6y ago
With support for both Wayland and xorg, improving support in toolkits and applications make more sense, though.
leadingthenet 6y ago
Same here. I’ve already been supporting to this project, but seeing how xorg is going to be their focus for potentially many months from now, I am debating whether to keep my contribution up.
p12tic 6y ago
Povilas from the linked article. It's not obvious, but adding touchpad gesture support to X will benefit you too even if you're not using X. This will make our work of convincing the maintainers of other open source projects much easier. X and Wayland cover essentially al Linux users, so we will not need to estimate how many users will benefit from implementing gesture support in toolkit X or application Y. This is really important, because maintainers of open source projects don't usually care about suggested features if they're not interested in them themselves. A new feature means additional work to them - discussing the design, reviewing PRs and handling of eventual bugs. Often the person who implements a feature disappears after the PR is merged. This makes the maintainers to view all feature proposals with a grain of salt. We need to have a convincing story of how majority end users would benefit in order to make the contributions easier.
- modzu 6y ago
  i dont follow..
  - 6y ago

hootbootscoot 6y ago

I'm still stuck on default trackpad Y-scroll direction under Linux. I've done some hacky input stream filter fix, but it's not working in ALL applications. (dunno why...don't really care...) I STILL feel uncomfortable using my thinkpad scrollpad in geany under linux, as it jumps and the scrolling isn't clearly indicating (through some animations i gather?) scrolling direction when I drag 2 fingers up and down... Multi-touch, great! ...I just feel like basic behavior still appears to be an anti-intuitive, if admittedly equally logically viable (swiping the paper up or down vs swiping the scrollbar, metaphorically speaking)

6AA4FD 6y ago
Could be wayland/xwayland if you're using that. My first thought.
- hootbootscoot 6y ago
  thanks for the helpful tip! but alas, I'm still on Xorg

grawprog 6y ago

I'm curious how this will compare with https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma/blob/master/README.md I've also personally been using multitouch zooming and scrolling in kde for years now. It will be cool to see a simplified, 'just working', desktop independent multitouch system for linux though.

ah- 6y ago
With full gesture support we'll hopefully get more interactivity, so e.g. if you switch workspaces with a four finger drag it moves as you perform the gesture and stops if you stop moving your fingers. fusuma seems to only recognise the gesture and then run a command afterwards.
- thinkbud 6y ago
  Exactly, gestures without interactivity are honestly not worth it in my opinion.
  - shaan7 6y ago
    Depends on what "not worth it" means really. Even though gestures minus interactivity is far from how "proper" gestures feel, I'd rather have something rather than nothing (for example, it is still more convenient to 3-finger swipe to switch virtual desktop than a keyboard shortcut or clicking a button).
    - thinkbud 6y ago
      Ok, I admit that "not worth it" is better rephrased as "not the end goal". If the end goal is interactive gestures, one-off discrete gestures are welcome as an intermediate step or halfway solution. Ideally the input framework would know if the streamed gesture was consumed real-time, and if not (e.g. no support for such interactice gesture in some program), the one-off event is issued. This reminds me of current xorg libinput two finger scrolling / wheel event. Xinput2 is the relevant keyword but I am not sure exactly how it all fits in, only what I can observe: - applications that don't know about multi finger scroll/pan listen for and accept classic mouse4 / mouse5 events and interpret them to scroll in steps if relevant. As an example, xev x event testing uility is not xinput2 aware AFAIK nor are classic x or older gtk programs - applications can be xinput2-aware (e.g. eog Eye of Gnome image viewer, but maybe also any non-ancient gtk3 application as well), in which case they can scroll more directly (pixel-smooth) and with appropriate acceleration / smoothing / inertia (gtk-specific ?). In firefox there's an env var like MOZ_USE_XINPUT2 which tells firefox it can do this smoother wheel handling, not sure if it's required or automatic these days. To test received events including xinput2, there is utility xinput --test-xi2 As a closing anecdote, there's an interesting interaction bug I have experienced with xfce where both xfwm will react to Super+scroll (compositor-level full screen zoom), and the application under the mouse pointer will also react to the scroll up/down. I have not deciphered the interactions here but it depends on app under mouse cursor...

thinkbud 6y ago

Honestly the write up seems ok but does not evoke optimism to me. I can't help it but to me macOS and it's multifinger gesture support is not about how many gestures it supports or which actions it supports, but the fluidity of the execution of gestures with animations. When you start pinching/unpinching fingers apart, the zoom happens in sync with your finger spacing. As soon as you start pinching, the application seems to receive with the event stream all the x and y coordinates so that pan and zoom can be done simultaneously in lockstep with the finger positions and spacing on the touch pad. Similarly when you pull 2 or 3 fingers from the side to e.g. go back a page, the reveal animation starts, or an arrow appears, and you can change your mind mid gesture by reversing the finger movement and the animation feedback is helpful enough to tell you that indeed the gesture will be canceled. I honestly hope that the developers interested in improving this in libinput and stack have the same understanding that gestures are not about recognizing the one-off side/pinch movement with a couple of fingers, but about low latency fluid interaction of fingers with visual animation feedback tightly coupled. The other (one-off) type of gestures where you swipe your three fingers to the left and then after a sampling interval the framework or stack receives a ThreeFingersLeft swipe event (with length or time or xy values) is IMO a very underwhelming experience.

CountSessine 6y ago
I’m a long time MBP user who’s switched to Linux on a thinkpad recently, after the butterfly switch debacle. I think the one gesture I used more than any other on my MBP was the 4-finger swipe left and right to switch workspaces. I would have a fullscreen iterm/tmux/vim session in each workspace - each tmux is a separate project with multiple panes and windows. I can't really bind a keyboard shortcut to switch workspaces because I have so many shortcuts already bound to tmux/vim/coc and other vim extensions, which is why it's so nice to be able to switch workspaces with a touchpad gesture. I could flip back and forth between workspaces effortlessly, without losing precious key shortcuts for development. It’s a fantastic dev setup. Fedora 32 seems to support this now! I don’t think that F31 did, but on F32 I can do the 4 finger swipe to switch workspaces, and on my thinkpad it works pretty much as smoothly and as interactively as it did on my MBP - swipe slowly and the screen slides following your fingers, change direction in the middle of the gesture and the screen slides back - the whole ‘stream input events and the screen is an extension of your fingers’ as you describe. The Linux desktop is getting a lot better. I don’t think I would ever have switched without Wayland and now they’re getting gestures right.

kerkeslager 6y ago

The touchpads on Macs are, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages they have. It's not just multitouch, it's also the sensitivity, the clarity between clicks and scrolling, and the general responsiveness of it. Force clicks are one exception: when I force click it's almost always by accident and I have never found a situation where force click was tied to useful functionality.

xrisk 6y ago
I think force click to look up the dictionary is useful, but that's pretty much it.
- sosborn 6y ago
  I set up my dictionary lookups to be done with a three-finger tap. Much easier.
- exprez135 6y ago
  My Catalina install broke the dictionary app for me, so there are no dictionaries other than Wikipedia. This was one of the most useful features of force touch for me :(
  - LeoPanthera 6y ago
    You can reinstall macOS without erasing your data or apps. Maybe give that a try. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904
- raybb 6y ago
  today I learned why my computer so often pops up the dictionary for no clear reason
ragnese 6y ago
I use a mac for work and have definitely spent some significant time working with it as an actual laptop. I really do appreciate the smooth scroll physics. But I really can't figure out why every raves about the gestures. I only ever trigger them by accident. I think I eventually turned them off, but only after screwing up a few times and thinking that I might some day actually want to use them.

habitue 6y ago

It sounds like no matter how much money is put into this, the sheer variety in how graphics are done on linux is going to make this a neverending task. Others have rightfully mentioned that the syncing animations with the trackpad is the big thing that makes the experience better, and even with Wayland, you're talking about interacting with both the window system and the compositor, both of which can be different. I'm not a huge fan of apple, but these kinds of small details are basically impossible to get right unless you've spent decades relentlessly deprecating old apis and consolidating them so there's only one fish in the barrel to shoot.

bluedays 6y ago
Since we can't see the source for MacOS or Windows we can't judge whether or not these are the same challenges that they also faced. Aside from the different display server protocols the challenges may not be unique to Linux. Perhaps the money that went into supporting this feature allowed them to overcome these challenges with much more ease. Unless someone who is more familiar with the source of MacOS can clarify otherwise I think it would be safe to say that this is not a new challenge, perse. Just new to Linux.

ZeroCool2u 6y ago

Damn. This is the first open source project I've ever sponsored and been really excited about sponsoring. However, I've been using Ubuntu on Wayland for the past 2 years and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Frankly, I'm not willing to move back to X and it seems like a step backwards to me to invest any time, effort, or money in X at this point, so I'm going to discontinue my contribution. I was hoping my monetary contribution would be a small ($25/Month) way to push Wayland forward, but the approach Bill and Povilas are taking is doing exactly the opposite by making it more comfortable for folks to stick with X. I understand there is disagreement and apprehension among the community with the slow move to Wayland, perhaps not at the same scale of systemd, but I firmly believe it's the best path forward and that X should be left behind.

1_player 6y ago
That's unfortunate. AFAIK GTK4 will be Wayland-only and out in a few months, and some bleeding edge distros such as Fedora already run Wayland out of the box, except if you have NVIDIA, because Xwayland is still crap under nv; but not for long, apparently there's some rumours and intention to improve the nv/xwayland situation, just nothing concrete out yet [1]. So yeah, betting on Xorg in 2020 is not a smart move IMO. 1: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Generic-Allocator-2019 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-G...
- new_realist 6y ago
  Distros keep trying to move to Wayland and then keep coming back to X11 due to usability. GTK4 is not going to help that.
- p12tic 6y ago
  > AFAIK GTK4 will be Wayland-only and out in a few months I think this is incorrect. See the following, X11 backend is listed among supported backends. https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/stable/extra-configuration-options.html#id-1.9.2.6.7 https://developer.gnome.org/gtk4/stable/extra-configuration-...
p12tic 6y ago

urbeanplayed 6y ago

As a long-time Linux on desktop user and tweaker, an early adopter of libinput under X, and an early adopter of Wayland, a historied-user of MBPs with nice touchpads, and Chromebook Pixels with glass touchpads, I just don't get it. There's still very little concrete information here that gives points to any solid net improvement for anyone using a modern Linux desktop (aka Wayland+libinput, which already support all of the original goals of this project). If you read the first two blog updates, they're straight out of FAANG PM-speak land. I can just hear the words echoing from a PM who vaguely understands an amalgamation of customer wants, without having any of the technical context of actual customer needs, architectural limitations, alternatives, etc. And this is exemplified in the nearly useless survey data. It is so poorly sliced, and presented that it's hard to know what was learned. There's no axis for X/Wayland, which X input driver was used, what DEs were used, etc. All of these significantly matter in the day-to-day feel of the touchpad considering how libinput is configured. Frankly, and this blog post more or less implies it, Wayland and libinput address nearly all of the original goals, and the ways in which they don't are either bugs in the drivers/libinput quirks that should be filled and fixed in libinput, or are simply the choices of GTK/Qt toolkits or DE designers and are part of a bigger design discussion that could help establish better defaults across toolkits+DEs. I just don't see why people are putting their hopes or money on this project. I don't see current, useful-to-Wayland problems being identified or worked on. Finally, a tip, for wayland + gestures, consider `gebaar-libinput`. And a solid net improvement to libinput (and up the stack) would be "stop scroll events". It's the only thing keeping the scrolling experience in Firefox+wayland+webrender from feeling just as good as Safari on a MBP.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

Double Tap to Zoom. That's literally the only thing I desperately miss from my touchpad on linux. If anyone knows of a way to get this on linux, please let me know I'd be ever grateful.

ghostpepper 6y ago
In case anyone is unfamiliar, on a mac in chrome or safari (not firefox for some reason) on any article, a double tap with two fingers on any row of text will smoothly zoom the page so the text takes up the exact width of the window - effectively hiding the margins while preserving the formatting of the text (ie. not reflowing the text)

derefr 6y ago

How does Android do multi-touch? How do Chromebooks? Is none of that work portable?

sitkack 6y ago

The focus on multi-touch gestures is missing the forest for the trees. If you look at the all of the next highest rated "features" they are not features but bugs. The reason that mac touchpads are so nice to use has _nothing_ to do with multitouch and everything to do with palm rejection, filtering, etc. It is a hard problem, analogous to and more difficult than writing multicopter flight control software. Having looked at the trackpad code, and fixing (in a very hacky way) some of the issues I was having, I have zero expectation that Linux laptops will get a mac like experience in the next couple years. Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political. Trackpad software and cut and paste are the two largest detractors for desktop Linux.

ragnese 6y ago
Could you elaborate a bit on the technical vs. political aspect at play here? I was kind of just assuming that the trackpad issue might have been, at least partly, because the hardware macs use for trackpads was special. Are you saying that's not the case? Also, what about cut and paste??
ssivark 6y ago
> Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political. Could you explain how/why? Is it about specializing in specific hardware/firmware?
- p12tic 6y ago
  Povilas from the linked blog here. In open source often no one really cares about a suggested feature or even a submitted pull requests. It means additional work for the project maintainers - discussing design, reviewing code and handling of eventual bug fixes. Often the person who made a PR disappears leaving all future bugs the problem of the maintainer. So naturally project maintainers are risk averse and often say no to new features. Things end up not being implemented, not because it's technically difficult, or there's nobody willing to do the work, but because the incentives don't align. The above opinion applies to open source in general as I've witnessed during the past decade. I'm not describing any projects that are related touchpad or input that I've been interacting with lately.

MayeulC 6y ago

Unsure why the blog article itself is in an iframe? https://public.amplenote.com/embed/TnE3JJDDy5QDo5aZAYtqyHz4?hostname=bill.harding.blog https://public.amplenote.com/embed/TnE3JJDDy5QDo5aZAYtqyHz4?... This plan has also has a huge flaw, that can be shortened to one letter: X. > Add gesture support to the Xorg display server > A "fun" fact: if all of this work was already done today, it would appear on Ubuntu as of next April's release. I'm betting you a drink that next April's release won't have an updated X server package. I haven't been following ubuntu packaging too closely, but last major x.org release was in 2018, and the next one hasn't been discussed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.Org_Server#Releases I expect Wayland to be the default on even more systems by then, maybe even KDE could default to it? Though Qt has been weighting them down with the transition, there are less and less rough edges remaining. So, this is probably going the hard way, for little at the end. It sounds like it caters more to the author's system configuration of choice (well, it's their money, though not really). As the author said, Wayland has most of the bits in place, we mostly need to tweak toolkits into supporting this (Qt, SDL, wx, fltk, Gtk?, etc). Starting there would lead early results, and the code path might be reusable is X is worth implementing later. On the other hand, X.org probably nears its final release, so if you want it to be burried with multitouch support, it's probably a good strategy to hurry. Let's see who is left in the X ecosystem: * GNOME: moved on to wayland, mostly, though strangely not with Ubuntu * KDE: moving along, a lot needs to be done in Qt * i3: sway is mostly compatible and quite nice to use (typing this there) * XFCE/LXDE: not sure, I think the projects have merged into LxQt, which has wayland support comming along. XFCE itself meanwhile doesn't have a timeline for wayland, but I think it's on the horizon * Openbox/fluxbox/Windowmaker: you're probably not into wayland. But there's a myriad of Wayland compositors that caters to the same * firefox: starts to work quite nicely, has hw-accelerated video decoding now under wayland. * Inkscape: supports it as of the 1.0 release * Gimp: On the roadmap for 3.0 with the GTK3 port (same situation as Inkscape) Tablet support is here (mostly), network transparency now has an alternative, albeit quite young, with waypipe ("network transparency" has never been a fundamental issue with Wayland, waypipe was bound to happen, I expect a lot more rough edges will disappear once 90% of the users are on Wayland). The missing pieces of the puzzle now are probably xdg-desktop-portal+pipewire support in the web browsers, that I often see people complaining about (and GNOME having their own screenshot interface doesn't help). That is coming. And the last piece, unified color correction with HDR support, I don't know that much about it to comment, but I've at least seen some work on HDR support for sway.

noiv 6y ago

I'm on Ubuntu Gnome with touchegg and use three finger up/down for workspaces and three finger left/right for the history in browser and Nautilus. There's even a gesture to toggle tabs in Firefox like ctrl-tab. It's not as smooth as a Mac, but still better than Windows :)

Onyros 6y ago

I would settle for Chrome OS-like touchpad smoothness and gestures in Linux. The out-of-the-box touchpad sensitivity and scroll smoothness in Chromebooks with outdated hardware and something as low-end and old as an a Celeron N2840 is incomparable to anything I've ever managed to configure in Linux, multifinger gestures included.

dang 6y ago

Recent threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515