5 ms·

I'll make the same point I make every time this topic comes up: there are Chromebooks with great touchpad experiences, and that's been the case for a long, long

by cxr 5y ago

I'll make the same point I make every time this topic comes up: there are Chromebooks with great touchpad experiences, and that's been the case for a long, long time. This is not a "Linux" or "open source" problem; this is a problem of ignorance and/or insufficient interest on the part traditional (i.e. non-ChromeOS) distros and their users. It's nuts that this was and continues to be a high-profile, multi-year effort spawning discussions that end up framing the whole thing as elusive—rather than, you know, a solved problem that is pretty much not even worth mentioning but for the long tradition of poor execution.

jeppesen-io 5y ago
I can't really tell the diffeence between Gnome 40 and Chromebooks touchpad experiences. What makes Chromebooks so much better?
- jeffbee 5y ago
  I think the main difference is Chromebook users did not have to wait a decade to get working touchpad gestures.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tentacleuno 5y ago
  When I use my trackpad on GNOME 40, the jitter is downright embarrassing. On a bad day, you can leave your two fingers in place and it'll jump around 25% of the page in a web browser, or the cursor starts to get drunk shakes. It's so much better on Windows. This is a software problem, and right now the Linux ecosystem is doing a pretty poor job.
lpasselin 5y ago
Which Chromebooks?
- kelvie 5y ago
  I'm not sure if it's global to chromebooks, but my pixelbook touchpad so far has been the only non-apple one I've ever tried that was tolerable. Though I haven't tried many others in the past 5 years.
  - glenstein 5y ago
    I agree with you and would include most or all Chromebooks I've experienced on that list. My experiences include the Acer C720, the Acer R11, the HP 11 (the white version that was recalled) the HP 14, and the original Chromebook Pixel laptop. Maybe the HP14 was not quite as great as the rest although I think it was fine, while the Pixel experience was exceptional. I don't think it's a matter of a specific one, I think it's generally across the board a very solid to good experience.
dylan604 5y ago
You don't need gestures or touchpad at all in a terminal. I surprised the touchpad doesn't go against some sort of ethos, then again, maybe that's why they suck so badly.?? Real coders don't let their hands leave the keyboard!
- visarga 5y ago
  Between mouse and touchpad I know which requires less hand movement away from the keyboard.
  - HatchedLake721 5y ago
    Main reason I don’t use external keyboard and mouse.
  - alpanka 5y ago
    Depends on whether you are a ThinkPad user :)
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    But coding is not about maximising keystrokes. If you were a copywriter I'd imagine this matters a lot. With coding the actual amount of code written is not very high, it's the thought that goes into it. I don't code an awful lot but I don't find reaching for the mouse a productivity issue. Also the different motions are good at using the hand/arm muscles in more diverse ways. However whatever works best for each of course. I love this about open source, everyone can pick what works best for them.
- kaba0 5y ago
  And using a terminal for everything blindly is just dumb. It’s a tool, it has its uses, but filling text buffers instead of manipulating pixels directly for general purpose GUIs is a hack and just dumb.
- BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
  I use two-finger scrolling on my touchpad when using a terminal. Is it necessary? No. But it's certainly easy and convenient, particularly since it works the same as it does in every other application. I can scroll faster in man with my trackpad than I can using the j and k keys. I know I could also use pgup/pgdown, but with those I have to move my hands anyway and I'm more likely to visually lose my place in the document (same problem with d/u, and the others.)
lucideer 5y ago
As an addendum, I also think this isn't exclusively a software problem. I use a Magic Trackpad 2 connected to my Linux Dell (work laptop) and it's great. Indistinguishable from using the same device connected to my macOS Macbook (personal laptop). I do use Touchegg for multitouch on Linux, but the responsiveness & behaviour hasn't changed otherwise with/without Touchegg installed so it's not that piece of software that's improving things. Also, the built-in touchpad on the Dell is ok-ish, but definitively inferior.
com2kid 5y ago
> This is not a "Linux" or "open source" problem; this is a problem of ignorance and/or insufficient interest on the part traditional (i.e. non-ChromeOS) distros and their users. Heyas! I worked on a touch screen driver, related but obviously not the same thing. So, consumer hardware, end to end control over every part. This gave us the chance to calibrate our driver to our specific hardware. Originally myself and another engineer worked on making the touch screen driver work, and it was "ok". After awhile, we did a complete rewrite, and another couple amazing engineers joined in, and it became "pretty good." We had some fancy state machine for gesture detection, and the code was about as good as we were going to be to make it. Then a team of experts came in and threw a bunch of math and ML at the problem to make the experience amazing. ML was used to fix up gestures so they actually worked properly, reduce latency (motion prediction!), and fix jitter, because touch screens are inherently analog devices and therefore noisy as heck. Could the two of us on our own have made an amazing touch screen experience? Heck no. No matter how many hours we put into it, we were never going to be able to match what that team of dedicated engineers brought to the table. And besides that, building an ML model up for the exact hardware we used is something that you just can't do when writing a generic driver that has to work all over the place. There is a reason Apple gets a better UX out of a hardware stack they own end to end.
- e12e 5y ago
  Thank you for taking the time to comment! You say: > I worked on a touch screen driver (...) consumer hardware, end to end control over every part But not for which os/kernel ? Was this for a pos-terminal or some similar hw/software bundle with a touch screen - or more like the driver for ipads?
  - com2kid 5y ago
    Microsoft Band, I also helped design the embedded runtime we used. :) Embedded is awesome, more so if you get to write your own mini-OS from the ground up. 100% recommend it!
wbharding 5y ago
> It's nuts that this was and continues to be a high-profile, multi-year effort spawning discussions that end up framing the whole thing as elusive—rather than, you know, a solved problem that is pretty much not even worth mentioning but for the long tradition of poor execution. That’s what I thought too until I actually started trying to solve the problem. Could you offer a more specific prescription for how you would go about taking the touchpad experience of ChromeOS and getting it shipped in a Linux context, if you were running this project? You seem baffled that this has not been solved yet, which makes me wonder if you know something that we don’t about the specifics of how Google’s source for ChromeOS touchpad could be trivially co-opted?
grishka 5y ago
Android is also technically a Linux distribution, and as you could imagine, its support for touchscreens is great. You can do amazing UI stuff with Linux if you throw away the "standard" desktop stack.
kelnos 5y ago
It's one thing to make a great touchpad experience on hardware you control, if you're willing to optimize the driver and stack for your hardware. It's quite another thing to support arbitrary hardware, most of which you can't test on.

by cxr 5y ago

jeppesen-io 5y ago

I can't really tell the diffeence between Gnome 40 and Chromebooks touchpad experiences. What makes Chromebooks so much better?

jeffbee 5y ago
I think the main difference is Chromebook users did not have to wait a decade to get working touchpad gestures.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tentacleuno 5y ago
When I use my trackpad on GNOME 40, the jitter is downright embarrassing. On a bad day, you can leave your two fingers in place and it'll jump around 25% of the page in a web browser, or the cursor starts to get drunk shakes. It's so much better on Windows. This is a software problem, and right now the Linux ecosystem is doing a pretty poor job.

lpasselin 5y ago

Which Chromebooks?

kelvie 5y ago
I'm not sure if it's global to chromebooks, but my pixelbook touchpad so far has been the only non-apple one I've ever tried that was tolerable. Though I haven't tried many others in the past 5 years.
- glenstein 5y ago
  I agree with you and would include most or all Chromebooks I've experienced on that list. My experiences include the Acer C720, the Acer R11, the HP 11 (the white version that was recalled) the HP 14, and the original Chromebook Pixel laptop. Maybe the HP14 was not quite as great as the rest although I think it was fine, while the Pixel experience was exceptional. I don't think it's a matter of a specific one, I think it's generally across the board a very solid to good experience.

dylan604 5y ago

You don't need gestures or touchpad at all in a terminal. I surprised the touchpad doesn't go against some sort of ethos, then again, maybe that's why they suck so badly.?? Real coders don't let their hands leave the keyboard!

visarga 5y ago
Between mouse and touchpad I know which requires less hand movement away from the keyboard.
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  Main reason I don’t use external keyboard and mouse.
- alpanka 5y ago
  Depends on whether you are a ThinkPad user :)
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  But coding is not about maximising keystrokes. If you were a copywriter I'd imagine this matters a lot. With coding the actual amount of code written is not very high, it's the thought that goes into it. I don't code an awful lot but I don't find reaching for the mouse a productivity issue. Also the different motions are good at using the hand/arm muscles in more diverse ways. However whatever works best for each of course. I love this about open source, everyone can pick what works best for them.
kaba0 5y ago
And using a terminal for everything blindly is just dumb. It’s a tool, it has its uses, but filling text buffers instead of manipulating pixels directly for general purpose GUIs is a hack and just dumb.
BrazzVuvuzela 5y ago
I use two-finger scrolling on my touchpad when using a terminal. Is it necessary? No. But it's certainly easy and convenient, particularly since it works the same as it does in every other application. I can scroll faster in man with my trackpad than I can using the j and k keys. I know I could also use pgup/pgdown, but with those I have to move my hands anyway and I'm more likely to visually lose my place in the document (same problem with d/u, and the others.)

lucideer 5y ago

As an addendum, I also think this isn't exclusively a software problem. I use a Magic Trackpad 2 connected to my Linux Dell (work laptop) and it's great. Indistinguishable from using the same device connected to my macOS Macbook (personal laptop). I do use Touchegg for multitouch on Linux, but the responsiveness & behaviour hasn't changed otherwise with/without Touchegg installed so it's not that piece of software that's improving things. Also, the built-in touchpad on the Dell is ok-ish, but definitively inferior.

com2kid 5y ago

> This is not a "Linux" or "open source" problem; this is a problem of ignorance and/or insufficient interest on the part traditional (i.e. non-ChromeOS) distros and their users. Heyas! I worked on a touch screen driver, related but obviously not the same thing. So, consumer hardware, end to end control over every part. This gave us the chance to calibrate our driver to our specific hardware. Originally myself and another engineer worked on making the touch screen driver work, and it was "ok". After awhile, we did a complete rewrite, and another couple amazing engineers joined in, and it became "pretty good." We had some fancy state machine for gesture detection, and the code was about as good as we were going to be to make it. Then a team of experts came in and threw a bunch of math and ML at the problem to make the experience amazing. ML was used to fix up gestures so they actually worked properly, reduce latency (motion prediction!), and fix jitter, because touch screens are inherently analog devices and therefore noisy as heck. Could the two of us on our own have made an amazing touch screen experience? Heck no. No matter how many hours we put into it, we were never going to be able to match what that team of dedicated engineers brought to the table. And besides that, building an ML model up for the exact hardware we used is something that you just can't do when writing a generic driver that has to work all over the place. There is a reason Apple gets a better UX out of a hardware stack they own end to end.

e12e 5y ago
Thank you for taking the time to comment! You say: > I worked on a touch screen driver (...) consumer hardware, end to end control over every part But not for which os/kernel ? Was this for a pos-terminal or some similar hw/software bundle with a touch screen - or more like the driver for ipads?
- com2kid 5y ago
  Microsoft Band, I also helped design the embedded runtime we used. :) Embedded is awesome, more so if you get to write your own mini-OS from the ground up. 100% recommend it!

wbharding 5y ago

> It's nuts that this was and continues to be a high-profile, multi-year effort spawning discussions that end up framing the whole thing as elusive—rather than, you know, a solved problem that is pretty much not even worth mentioning but for the long tradition of poor execution. That’s what I thought too until I actually started trying to solve the problem. Could you offer a more specific prescription for how you would go about taking the touchpad experience of ChromeOS and getting it shipped in a Linux context, if you were running this project? You seem baffled that this has not been solved yet, which makes me wonder if you know something that we don’t about the specifics of how Google’s source for ChromeOS touchpad could be trivially co-opted?

grishka 5y ago

Android is also technically a Linux distribution, and as you could imagine, its support for touchscreens is great. You can do amazing UI stuff with Linux if you throw away the "standard" desktop stack.

kelnos 5y ago

It's one thing to make a great touchpad experience on hardware you control, if you're willing to optimize the driver and stack for your hardware. It's quite another thing to support arbitrary hardware, most of which you can't test on.