Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

rachelbythebay.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 284 posts

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#51

Post by qznc »

INTPenis wrote: post #30

This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building. At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use. So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse ma…

Around 1995 I had my own PC but only my dads PC had internet access. Every other day I had half an hour of internet to download stuff. Then lots of time playing around on my PC.

I did Linux from Scratch back then, for example.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#52

Post by capableweb »

savolai wrote: post #17
jeroenhd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.

You need to experience it to understand just how much more calibrated it is to the human experience, feels natural, like air. :) How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?

I'm a huge linux fan and run both Ubuntu and Arch Linux on a daily basis, but I used to be on OSX and Apple hardware between something like 2012 -> 2015 before switching back to Ubuntu/Arch. The only thing Apple does better is touchpad input.

And I also cannot put the difference into words, but if you have Ubuntu (even with synaptics drivers) and MacBook side by side, there is a noticeable difference in how they behave and feel but even by having them side-by-side, I can't consciously tell the difference, even if I feel it.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#53

Post by jeroenhd »

willvarfar wrote: post #32
jeroenhd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.

I don’t have a clue about _why_, but I know from using macOS and Linux on mbp that whereas the touchpad basically works in macOS, it totally doesn’t function in Linux! :( In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type. Screens start scrolling, focus goes to random things, and everyone swears. You end up having to hold your hands right over the keyboard in a very unnatural way to avoid accidental mouse inte…

The trackpad in my laptop (Synaptics branded) has never had trouble like that in my experience.

Then again, I'm pretty sure Synaptics has wrist detection built into the firmware of the trackpad itself. I suppose Apple and Windows do this in software for models that don't support this and that's why it's going wrong.

I'm not saying that people don't use Linux on laptops by the way, I meant that the overlap between people who run Linux and use a MBP isn't very large (because Linux on Apple can be anything from annoying to install to near impossible).

But, as far as I know, Apple still releases the source code for Darwin, right? So shouldn't it be possible to port the trackpad functionality from there? Or did Apple hide the trackpad driver in a closed source blob?

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#54

Post by microtonal »

anthk wrote: post #31
microtonal wrote: post #18

If you have bash, you could retrieve wget or CURL and go from there. { echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\nHost: ftp.gnu.org\r\n\r" >&3; cat /dev/tcp/ftp.gnu.org/80

Getting it from a Gopher mirror would be even easier, the protocol is barebones. But bash is cheating, you can write an IRC/FTP/Gopher client in seconds and fetch all the info and documentation from here. You can browse the wikipedia, read an HN mirror, play IF games and even seek Gutenberg from Bash as I can see by just connecting to the port 70 and doing simple Gopher queries. That's too easy then. If the shell is…

I guess that the task is really underspecified (maybe intentionally to have different speed runs). It makes a huge difference whether you have a kernel with a TCP/IP stack, a C compiler, a C library with the socket API, etc.

The point of the shell example is, that once you have some way to easily open a socket, you can bootstrap a more complete system very quickly. You download a more complete root image from your favorite distribution and override / with that, etc.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#56

Post by qeternity »

lloeki wrote: post #50
jeroenhd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not during lockdown I'm afraid. I guess if it's a "feel" thing it should be possible to replicate it with lots of tweaking, but I don't think many people who run Linux on laptops use the Apple trackpad much so the overlap between the people who want this and the people who care to write such drivers probably isn't big enough to come up with a Macbook style driver.

If you’re thinking tuning as in artist sensibility and acceleration then you’re quite off, the experience goes way beyond this. For example rest two fingers and press to click, that’s a right click. But rest two fingers and click with the thumb, that’s still a right click, not a three finger click. Same for two finger scrolling. That’s a couple of simple examples but there are a lot of subtle corner cases like that a…

Yeah, I’m not sure why there’s such a massive contingent that admit to having never owned an Apple product (some snarky comment about the Apple tax) and dismiss the hordes of serious engineers who use these products. Can you get 90% of the way there with your favorite flavor of Linux? Yup. Are there some things that Linux does far better? Definitely (looking at you containers). But it’s that 10% sugar that make most (not all) people more productive. But if I can make my expensive engineers more productive by spending a few hundred $ premium on the single most important piece of kit I’m giving them, well that’s insanely good ROI.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#57

Post by fantispug »

I've thought about a variant of this with Baking Pi [1]. That takes you through assembly to the point of having a Raspberry Pi with a minimal terminal (with just an external USB driver the author wrote).

I think it would be interesting to see how quickly you could get from there to a useful system, say one where you could download the USB driver from github and compile it. But I definitely don't know enough to do that.

[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/tutorials/os/

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#58

Post by m463 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #16
bschwindHN wrote: post #13

Bored? Write a touchpad driver based on libinput which gives you identical mouse acceleration between Macbook trackpads and linux trackpads.

As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.

It's been a while since I tried the default setup, but I believe it is set up so mouse buttons are simulated by clicking on the bottom left and bottom right of the touchpad. Additionally the touchpad sometimes causes stray input while your hands are above it typing.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#59

Post by Dunedan »

willvarfar wrote: post #32
jeroenhd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.

I don’t have a clue about _why_, but I know from using macOS and Linux on mbp that whereas the touchpad basically works in macOS, it totally doesn’t function in Linux! :( In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type. Screens start scrolling, focus goes to random things, and everyone swears. You end up having to hold your hands right over the keyboard in a very unnatural way to avoid accidental mouse inte…

At least KDE offers the option to disable the touchpad while typing. I'd expect other desktop environments to do the same. Isn't that what you're looking for?

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#60

Post by idle_zealot »

mschuster91 wrote: post #36
pests wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC Linux and Windows drivers turn trackpad events into mouse events so by the time the OS sees the movement there is no touchpad info. Apple with tighter integration delivers the actual touchpad movement data and not a faked mouse event. Windows 10 has had work done in this area too but not sure the details.

To make stuff worse, Elantech/Synaptics feature-gate their drivers... I have had laptops where I put a trackpad driver from some totally different laptop and suddenly I'd have a lot more gestures. But no matter what, two finger scrolling and zooming won't ever be as smooth and "step free" under Windows/Linux... once experienced, cannot be missed.

>But no matter what, two finger scrolling and zooming won't ever be as smooth and "step free" under Windows/Linux

That's not true. I'm not sure exactly what's changed but when running Firefox with the Wayland backend I've found that scrolling is continuous.

Post reply on HN