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Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

bill.harding.blog

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Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#151

Post by kochthesecond »

noobermin wrote: post #131

I guess it helps not to get used to "better experiences" just judging by the comments here. I bought a laptop and and have dual boot but use linux primarily. Every time I'd have to use Windows, it would be a serious frustrating pain in the ass. A lot of these things I am 999% convinced are just based on familiarity than actual ergonomics.

Well, the Mac trackpad is an absolute joy to use..

The quality of trackpads outside of Macs used to annoy me to no end, but my 2018 zenbook with libinput isn't that bad. It's like 80% of the way there for a quarter of the price.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#152

Post by kochthesecond »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #11
phoe-krk wrote: 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.

I would also donate 25-50$ to this, but once or twice. No recurring please

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#153

Post by wegs »

cycloptic wrote: post #64
zozbot234 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, whether a "hardware database" is a better place for a device-specific option than a "config file" is just semantics; what actually matters is that supporting device-specific quirks should be straightforward for the end-user. As for user-facing options, if the maintainer thinks they are 'too expensive' to maintain in the code, that means the existing architecture of that code is misguided and should be r…

It was already refactored, into libinput. The issue with testability is not about the code being badly architected. The fact is if you have 100 config options and 1000 supported hardware devices, you must test all possible options and now your test matrix has something on the order of 2 ^ 100 * 1000 cases to go through. This combinatorial explosion is unsustainable. I personally disagree that device quirks should be…

I can come up with architectures which avoid the combinatorial explosion of test cases. Most of these hinge on two pieces of architecture and one of organization:

1) Giving drivers ways to expose additional functionality through extensions (a thin pass-through)

2) Giving abstract APIs which allow transformations between the input and the output

3) Having the mess live outside. The maintainer maintains interfaces, but not the exponential explosion of one-of-features and quirks.

Examples of such architectures include themable / programmable window managers (e.g. Enlightment/xmonad/etc.), Photoshop/gimp filters/extensions, or EMACS.

Whether or not this is a good idea is a different question. I don't have an opinion there. I definitely would have had time playing with something like this as a teenager. I just expect things to work as an adult with adult responsibilities. A lot of this comes down to target audience, resources available, and other questions which I have zero insight into.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#154

Post by the_af »

eth0up wrote: 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…

I love this and your subsequent responses. I want to share one of my own.

A few years back -- so I cannot blame the pandemic -- I was fed up with my old Dell XPS. It was originally a pretty awesome laptop, but it was reaching the end of its useful life and it had many quirks. One was a key that was acting weird. In a fit of rage -- and I trust you'll understand me -- I decided to remove the key to see what was the deal, and proceeded to disassemble the whole laptop to do so, tugging at cables, forcing the case, twisting things out of the way. Because YouTube tutorials weren't clear enough, I ended up destroying the laptop. I didn't even find the reason the key was acting up.

With the laptop re-assembled but clearly beat up, parts of it destroyed, my wife arrived, took a look and said:

"You know you could have removed the key without dismantling the laptop, right?" and proceeded to show me how. In my rage I hadn't even considered this.

I wanted to buy a new laptop, anyway!

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#155

Post by myself248 »

hossbeast wrote: post #139
myself248 wrote: post #90

This is still the most frustrating thing about Linux for me. I have two Thinkpads, a T460 running Windows from my employer, and a T560 running Ubuntu as my personal. Their touchpad hardware is, of course, identical. The experiences couldn't be more different. When I first got the machine, I spent weeks fighting with the driver, trying to figure out how a single number can represent four lines on two dimensions to def…

So are you backing the project then?

I read everything I could about what the project aims to accomplish, and none of it sounds like the things I find frustrating. Making it "more like a Mac" will not solve a single one of my issues. Palm touch ranked super low and pointer precision wasn't even mentioned. So, no.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#156

Post by myself248 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #149
robrtsql wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't use a mouse on my lap, though.

Just out of curiosity, why do you need to do work on your lap? The posture is really bad and unhealthy. Doesn't anyone own a table for eating where you can use your laptop as well? I've been owning laptops for 12 years now and never used it on my lap. The only times I saw people use laptops on their laps is on TV.

I use my laptop on my lap or in bed all the time. I own a couple of perfectly fine mice, but the reason laptops have touchpads built into them in the first place is that they're not always well suited to mice.

If I wanted a computer I could only use at a desk with a mouse, I'd have bought a desktop.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#157

Post by myself248 »

wbkang wrote: post #112
aarmenaa wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed that two-finger scrolling, which should be one of the easiest things to get right, is wrong on basically anything that's not MacOS. Windows and Linux arbitrarily insist on 3-line scrolling in a lot of apps. Even when pixel scrolling is technically available, it works poorly. It appears small movements are ignored, and then once you've hit some sort of distance threshold the scroll "jumps" to register the…

Actually on Windows, 3 line scrolling is a configurable default in the control panel. On X/Linux, on the other hand, is where it's hard-coded to 1 line and there is no way to change it to 3 without having undesired side effects (such as scroll events being fired 3 times).

But no matter what you set it to, an inch of scroll motion on the trackpad results in a different number of screen-inches of window movement, between different apps.

In Ubuntu right now: Firefox seems pretty intuitive, one trackpad-height worth of finger movement results in roughly one screen-height worth of window movement. That's great.

But LibreOffice Calc, for the same amount of finger movement in the upward direction, scrolls about 3 screenfulls up. And bizarrely, for the same amount of finger movement in the downward direction, scrolls about half a screen.

Discord desktop app (which I assume is Electron like everything else), scrolls about 1.5 screens per touchpad-worth of finger movement. That's acceptably close to Firefox and not disorienting.

Gedit scrolls about 2 screens per touchpad.

Arduino IDE scrolls about 2 screens per touchpad.

How on earth can these be different? And how do you even start to fix that?

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#158

Post by rurban »

bchociej wrote: post #92

Color me stunned that people are so dissatisfied with their touchpads in Linux. 0-3 lines of options in my config have made me perfectly content with every touchpad I've ever used in Linux.

Care to share? Would be really appreciated

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#159

Post by robrtsql »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #149
robrtsql wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't use a mouse on my lap, though.

Just out of curiosity, why do you need to do work on your lap? The posture is really bad and unhealthy. Doesn't anyone own a table for eating where you can use your laptop as well? I've been owning laptops for 12 years now and never used it on my lap. The only times I saw people use laptops on their laps is on TV.

The main example I can think of is when I'm not home--sometimes it's nice to be able to use my laptop in a not-very-accommodating public space, like on the bus.

You're right, though. I try to avoid doing that whenever possible.

Re: Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results

#160

Post by spacephysics »

neal_jones wrote: post #124
spacephysics wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, despite the overheating issue with my model, and the copious amount of OS issues with the more recent releases, I’ve yet to find a laptop that comes close to Apple’s track pad. To a point where sometimes I prefer the track pad over a mouse.

You’ve probably already heard about this, but there has been a large discussion about how charging from the traditional left side of 15” (and I believe 16”) MBPs results in heat and fan issues. A lot of people have had improved results just by switching power to the right.

Currently using a third-party 'mag-safe' adapter and after changing to the recommended side, have had much less issues with heat
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