5 ms·

It's cool bro, just recompile libinput after commenting out this line. 2020, year of the Linux desktop :)

by sippingjippers 6y ago

weikju 6y ago
YES to user empowerment.
- mlyle 6y ago
  YES to shipping something that's broken for many people, but that at least 1 in 1000 of them will dig up some esoteric knowledge, patch and recompile packages that many others depend upon, and "fix it"?
  - sangnoir 6y ago
    > YES to shipping something that's broken for many people, but that at least 1 in 1000 of them will dig up some esoteric knowledge, patch and recompile packages that many others depend upon, and "fix it"? All software is broken in some way, so everyone says yes to shipping something that's broken. All things considered, it's not an important feature, especially considering it has a work-around. They have have the ticket for the issue and it's on a backlog. As with all software projects, they have to triage bugs, prioritize their work and allocate resources. The awesome thing about open source is that anyone can create a patch for the fix, and resolve it for everyone. Compare this to some Apple Radar bugs that are old enough to vote, but only Apple employees can fix.
    - mlyle 6y ago
      Sure, but the impact here is pretty massive. Pointing to a workaround that most people won't find and that takes developer knowledge to employ is of limited value to most users, but in the open source community is often used as an excuse to ignore what would otherwise be high priority bugs.
      - sangnoir 6y ago
        > ...but in the open source community is often used as an excuse to ignore what would otherwise be high priority bugs. Key word here is community - it's not just up to the maintainers and regular contributors (who may already be overtaxed with both their day jobs and managing the software project for no pay). Users who have a particularly urgent itch to scratch have to step up - if they're not technical, perhaps put a bounty on the fix so someone else is financially motivated to fix it. Abusing (IMO) maintainers by screaming at them to hurry-up-and-fix-it is not helpful, especially since they are volunteering their free time.
viraptor 6y ago
As compared to any year of windows on the desktop where my touchpad randomly registers right click rather than simple tap and drivers are closed so I can't fix it? I'll take the possibility to recompile.
- exDM69 6y ago
  Yes! Just to provide one anecdotal example, I have a Asus Zenbook Windows 10 laptop (OEM installed), where the touchpad just randomly breaks after some Windows updates every few years. Right now my laptop isn't recognizing any multi touch gestures, which makes scrolling a pain in the ass. I can't exactly remember what I did to fix it the last time, but it involved downloading some drivers from the touchpad manufacturers website (not the laptop vendor), which looked really dodgy. A non-technical user would have zero chance of getting it to work. For a technical user such as myself, it would be much easier to recompile libinput with some patch I grabbed from their issue tracker. As a bonus, there's less chance of getting malware from the latter than going to some Asian hardware manufacturer's poorly translated website in search of a compatible driver download.
- tsss 6y ago
  Sounds great compared to my Linux experience where the touchpad stops working completely after waking up from sleep because of kernel regressions.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    There's always some anecdote with worse outcome. Someone else will have a touchpad which doesn't work at all on windows. Someone else's sets the house on fire under Linux, etc. My point is you have the chance to fix on one side though. It may not be practical or something most people can do. But it's there.
- mlyle 6y ago
  You can easily turn off the "right side of trackpad is right click" thing. I don't know why this ships turned on, given so many machines implement it poorly, but it's just one config checkbox to turn a trackpad that is awful this way to one that is OK. (I'm referring to "Press the lower right corner of the touchpad to right-click" box. The Dells that the school I teach at has are near unusable with this clicked, but improve significantly with it off and using two-fingers to right click instead).
Liskni_si 6y ago
I agree that this isn't an ideal user experience. On the other hand, recompiling libinput in 2020 takes about as much time as taking out a credit card from your wallet and paying for another closed source macOS app. I just timed myself doing it on a fresh vagrant VM, and it took me less than two minutes. One full minute was downloading and installing build dependencies, and that would normally be a few seconds as most people already have gcc. The steps I took were: sudo apt build-dep libinput sudo apt install fakeroot apt source libinput cd libinput-1.12.6/ grep -r tp_detect vim src/evdev-mt-touchpad.c dpkg-buildpackage -b sudo dpkg -i -O ../libinput*.deb Oh and I'm tempted to argue that this is, in fact, a user experience we deserve. ThinkPads are used by many developers worldwide. Most of my friends at Red Hat have it. Last time I could check (2011), Google gave developers ThinkPads with Linux as one of the options. Any single one of us could have fixed this bug in one day, and then spend maybe another full day communicating with Peter to get the fix in shape and merged. Yet it still isn't fixed. Free software often is free as in beer, but the real point is that we can, and we should, participate. Throwing money through GitHub Sponsors is one option, but often the best way is to just roll your sleeves up and do the work.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- EE84M3i 6y ago
  Wow, I've never seen it so clearly described how to download/modify/rebuild/install a debian package before. I thought that there were like a billion ways to do this -- pbuilder, debootstrap, fakeroot, sbuild, ./debian/rules, probably a few others I'm forgetting. Every time I've interacted with this over the last decade it's given me a headache. In 2020, is `dpkg-buildpackage` the official way to do this? It seems very easy!
  - Liskni_si 6y ago
    There are a million ways to do it, but dpkg-buildpackage has been here for ages and if all you need is rebuilding a package for your personal use and for your current system and architecture and don't mind installing builddeps into your system, it's definitely the easiest. The other options are good if you need to ensure the package will build elsewhere, or if you need to cross build for a different architecture (which you might need if you're running a multiarch system and you need to patch a library like Mesa that's still needed by some 32 bit apps), or if you don't want to clog your system with build deps or something like that. Last time I needed to do that, I used cowbuilder, but I'm not really an expert in this area, I'm just a Debian power user, not involved with the project directly.

It's cool bro, just recompile libinput after commenting out this line. 2020, year of the Linux desktop :)

weikju 6y ago

YES to user empowerment.

mlyle 6y ago
YES to shipping something that's broken for many people, but that at least 1 in 1000 of them will dig up some esoteric knowledge, patch and recompile packages that many others depend upon, and "fix it"?
- sangnoir 6y ago
  > YES to shipping something that's broken for many people, but that at least 1 in 1000 of them will dig up some esoteric knowledge, patch and recompile packages that many others depend upon, and "fix it"? All software is broken in some way, so everyone says yes to shipping something that's broken. All things considered, it's not an important feature, especially considering it has a work-around. They have have the ticket for the issue and it's on a backlog. As with all software projects, they have to triage bugs, prioritize their work and allocate resources. The awesome thing about open source is that anyone can create a patch for the fix, and resolve it for everyone. Compare this to some Apple Radar bugs that are old enough to vote, but only Apple employees can fix.
  - mlyle 6y ago
    Sure, but the impact here is pretty massive. Pointing to a workaround that most people won't find and that takes developer knowledge to employ is of limited value to most users, but in the open source community is often used as an excuse to ignore what would otherwise be high priority bugs.
    - sangnoir 6y ago
      > ...but in the open source community is often used as an excuse to ignore what would otherwise be high priority bugs. Key word here is community - it's not just up to the maintainers and regular contributors (who may already be overtaxed with both their day jobs and managing the software project for no pay). Users who have a particularly urgent itch to scratch have to step up - if they're not technical, perhaps put a bounty on the fix so someone else is financially motivated to fix it. Abusing (IMO) maintainers by screaming at them to hurry-up-and-fix-it is not helpful, especially since they are volunteering their free time.

viraptor 6y ago

As compared to any year of windows on the desktop where my touchpad randomly registers right click rather than simple tap and drivers are closed so I can't fix it? I'll take the possibility to recompile.

exDM69 6y ago
Yes! Just to provide one anecdotal example, I have a Asus Zenbook Windows 10 laptop (OEM installed), where the touchpad just randomly breaks after some Windows updates every few years. Right now my laptop isn't recognizing any multi touch gestures, which makes scrolling a pain in the ass. I can't exactly remember what I did to fix it the last time, but it involved downloading some drivers from the touchpad manufacturers website (not the laptop vendor), which looked really dodgy. A non-technical user would have zero chance of getting it to work. For a technical user such as myself, it would be much easier to recompile libinput with some patch I grabbed from their issue tracker. As a bonus, there's less chance of getting malware from the latter than going to some Asian hardware manufacturer's poorly translated website in search of a compatible driver download.
tsss 6y ago
Sounds great compared to my Linux experience where the touchpad stops working completely after waking up from sleep because of kernel regressions.
- viraptor 6y ago
  There's always some anecdote with worse outcome. Someone else will have a touchpad which doesn't work at all on windows. Someone else's sets the house on fire under Linux, etc. My point is you have the chance to fix on one side though. It may not be practical or something most people can do. But it's there.
mlyle 6y ago
You can easily turn off the "right side of trackpad is right click" thing. I don't know why this ships turned on, given so many machines implement it poorly, but it's just one config checkbox to turn a trackpad that is awful this way to one that is OK. (I'm referring to "Press the lower right corner of the touchpad to right-click" box. The Dells that the school I teach at has are near unusable with this clicked, but improve significantly with it off and using two-fingers to right click instead).

Liskni_si 6y ago

I agree that this isn't an ideal user experience. On the other hand, recompiling libinput in 2020 takes about as much time as taking out a credit card from your wallet and paying for another closed source macOS app. I just timed myself doing it on a fresh vagrant VM, and it took me less than two minutes. One full minute was downloading and installing build dependencies, and that would normally be a few seconds as most people already have gcc. The steps I took were: sudo apt build-dep libinput sudo apt install fakeroot apt source libinput cd libinput-1.12.6/ grep -r tp_detect vim src/evdev-mt-touchpad.c dpkg-buildpackage -b sudo dpkg -i -O ../libinput*.deb Oh and I'm tempted to argue that this is, in fact, a user experience we deserve. ThinkPads are used by many developers worldwide. Most of my friends at Red Hat have it. Last time I could check (2011), Google gave developers ThinkPads with Linux as one of the options. Any single one of us could have fixed this bug in one day, and then spend maybe another full day communicating with Peter to get the fix in shape and merged. Yet it still isn't fixed. Free software often is free as in beer, but the real point is that we can, and we should, participate. Throwing money through GitHub Sponsors is one option, but often the best way is to just roll your sleeves up and do the work.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
EE84M3i 6y ago
Wow, I've never seen it so clearly described how to download/modify/rebuild/install a debian package before. I thought that there were like a billion ways to do this -- pbuilder, debootstrap, fakeroot, sbuild, ./debian/rules, probably a few others I'm forgetting. Every time I've interacted with this over the last decade it's given me a headache. In 2020, is `dpkg-buildpackage` the official way to do this? It seems very easy!
- Liskni_si 6y ago
  There are a million ways to do it, but dpkg-buildpackage has been here for ages and if all you need is rebuilding a package for your personal use and for your current system and architecture and don't mind installing builddeps into your system, it's definitely the easiest. The other options are good if you need to ensure the package will build elsewhere, or if you need to cross build for a different architecture (which you might need if you're running a multiarch system and you need to patch a library like Mesa that's still needed by some 32 bit apps), or if you don't want to clog your system with build deps or something like that. Last time I needed to do that, I used cowbuilder, but I'm not really an expert in this area, I'm just a Debian power user, not involved with the project directly.