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Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

bill.harding.blog

11–20 of 174 posts

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#11
post #2

> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.

I answered the poll, and said I would pay $50 for this, but never received any follow up (and I think I provided my email, I usually do in polls if they give the option).

Now I just realized that there is a github sponsor link, but it's recurring. I don't want recurring. I want to send $50 once.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#12
post #6
post #4

Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux, is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness" sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the wiki for Unethical Human Experimentatio…

If a touchpad does this much to you I'm sorry to inform you may have a more serious problem than the touchpad. Sleep, diet, exercise, and meditation.

Says the guy using a Mac, the best touchpad within 5 parsecs.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#13
post #2

> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.

The poll respondents did not indicate they would be willing to donate to the cause. They indicated they would be willing to donate to "fix it". There is a very big difference between paying to fix a problem and paying for a stranger to work on a project that may end up fixing the problem one day.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#14
post #6
post #4

Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux, is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness" sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the wiki for Unethical Human Experimentatio…

If a touchpad does this much to you I'm sorry to inform you may have a more serious problem than the touchpad. Sleep, diet, exercise, and meditation.

Thanks for the psychoanalysis. Two of what you mentioned are inevitable. The exercise part is taken care of by the default settings which require multiple laps to impel the indolent pointer across the screen, and finally, I meditated deeply during the excision. See; you're a pretty astute therapist after all.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#15
I'm a little unclear on how close to the funding goal this is. As far as I can tell, the goal is $10k total, but the current funding level shown is per month. Does it just mean that work can't begin until the accrued balance reaches $10k?

Also, is there a way to make a one-time donation rather than an ongoing monthly pledge?

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#16
post #2

> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.

Well, let me put it this way. I would donate $250 to fix it. I think that's how much working support for touch, trackpad, and pen input would be worth it to me.

I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves.

I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" approach), especially with the claimed problem, solution, and approaches.

With open source, it's easy to find people to do the fun, modular bits (acceleration curves, palm rejection, etc.). It's hard to find people to do the plumbing and the not-fun bits. If OP were to create a pipeline which:

* Supported the broad range of trackpads, tablets, styluses, etc. on the market

* Did this with clean abstractions and modular drivers (NOT wrappers around wrappers around wrappers of what other people have written, but the painful work of refactoring other people's code)

* Integrated with the desktop properly, potentially extending existing standards if necessary (NOT tried to replace the desktop with yet another standard no one supports)

* Handled the odd-ball cases (a touchscreen, a drawing tablet, a drawing display, AND a plain old monitor are plugged into a box. What happens?)

* Provided clean, simple, documented, pluggable APIs where people could tinker around with the fun stuff (anyone can make a new algorithm in Python and see it work in 5 minutes)

That would solve the problem.

For reference, their approach: "(1) evaluate which multi-touch features can be implemented with the least work 2) start to quantify the current nature of palm detection 3) measure how the acceleration curve of Linux touchpad compares to that of macOS. I have some ideas on how we might calibrate the acceleration curve to better match macOS, but it would be handy if anyone else has bright ideas on how they would attempt to quantify the touchpad acceleration curve on macOS (such that we can seek to match it here)."

I could be wrong about all of this, but that's what it would take for ME to donate. I guess the other approach is to accomplish something yourself and establish a track record. I WILL instead donate to DIGImend, where a lone developer seems to heroically be successfully bringing tablet support to Linux. That's an example of a track record.

https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=930980 https://liberapay.com/spbnick/donate https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spbnick

I'm sure this will go -5, since most critical posts do, but I find critical feedback to be more important than positivisty.

edit: Just donated to DIGImend.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#17
post #3
post #2

> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.

Link to donate: https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

But who is that guy and how would the money be used? From his profile it doesn't seem like he is a Linux developer.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#18
post #16
post #2

> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.

Well, let me put it this way. I would donate $250 to fix it. I think that's how much working support for touch, trackpad, and pen input would be worth it to me. I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves. I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" appr…

> If OP were to create a pipeline which: ... That would solve the problem.

The libinput project and pipeline was developed as a way of pursuing these goals, but it doesn't even have all the features of the legacy synaptics driver. It's not hard to see where the work should be going: start with bringing libinput up to feature parity (and fork the project if maintainers won't accept your changes upstream), then go further from there.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let me put it this way. I would donate $250 to fix it. I think that's how much working support for touch, trackpad, and pen input would be worth it to me. I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves. I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" appr…

> If OP were to create a pipeline which: ... That would solve the problem. The libinput project and pipeline was developed as a way of pursuing these goals, but it doesn't even have all the features of the legacy synaptics driver. It's not hard to see where the work should be going: start with bringing libinput up to feature parity (and fork the project if maintainers won't accept your changes upstream), then go furt…

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