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Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

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Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#251

Post by asoneth »

IshKebab wrote: post #250
bheadmaster wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple doesn't put "better touchpad" on their labels either. It's just very very obvious that they're better. Exactly. Everyone knows Apple has better touchpad, but nobody knows that about some random PC manufacturer. How will they signal that he has better touchpad in order to justify the higher price?

By sending their laptop to shops and reviewers for people to try? There are plenty of PC manufacturers that aren't "some random PC manufacturer". ThinkPad, Asus, Acer, HP, Dell. They are known brands that can easily maintain reputations.

I've read PC reviews that do point out when a touchpad is abysmal or excellent, or list models with good touchpads (https://www.windowscentral.com/best-laptop-touchpad) but near as I can tell most customers aren't willing to spend more money on a model with an excellent touchpad so it's not surprising that most manufacturers don't bother adding them except possibly on their premium lines.

I would also wager that the sort of customers who are willing to spend more for interface refinements like an excellent touchpad already use Apple hardware at a higher rate than the general population, further shrinking customer demand for good PC touchpads.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#252

Post by asoneth »

al_borland wrote: post #6

Why does this seem like such a hard problem to solve for everyone that isn’t Apple, when Apple seemingly solved the Trackpad over a decade ago? Is this it? An unknown ROI? >the highly uncertain ROI for trying to align touchpad acceleration has prevented us from proposing a system change to the default Linux settings. I can only speak for myself, but I gave up using trackpads on anything that isn’t a MacBook many year…

> Why does this seem like such a hard problem to solve for everyone that isn’t Apple

One factor is that many customers don't demand this kind of refinement, and of those who do many of them already use Macs.

Another is that it's not primarily a technical problem, but an organizational one. These kinds of interface refinements require coordinating across hardware, drivers, OS, toolkit, and applications. It would be hard for any one person to own that problem in Open Source Software.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#253

Post by mr337 »

LorenDB wrote: post #90

I'm confused what this is trying to achieve. In my four years of Linux usage, I have had no complaints about the touchpad[0]. [0] Other than the issue where sometimes my touchpad requires an extra finger touch to work after resuming from suspend, but I have a hunch that is a hardware/firmware issue. In fact, I seem to recall that happening on a Windows machine once.

Same here and on my laptops I don't need the extra finger touch. It just works.

I have had a work MPB for years and while the touchpad is nice I just use the other touchpads with no problems.

Then again as I like bigger displays I use an external keyboard and mouse when not traveling.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#254

Post by jmole »

sandreas wrote: post #227
jmole wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, if you moved the cursor to another window, the other window started scrolling, because of the simulated events. This is such a trivial thing to fix, you just stop sending scroll events when the cursor moves. Peter has done a great job on libinput for the most part, but he is 100% wrong about inertial scrolling (and button remapping, among a few other things).

> Peter has done a great job on libinput for the most part, but he is 100% wrong about inertial scrolling (and button remapping, among a few other things). Maybe you're right. However, this should not about individual persons / projects... this is more about that I'm still uncertain, why so many experts cannot get this thing right by just working together finding a suitable solution :-) There must by more than one wa…

> the "driver" (libinput) should not send "simulated" events

scrolling itself is a simulated event. So is any two-finger gesture that isn't directly represented as an affine transform from one pair of coordinates to another.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#255

Post by k8svet »

iknowstuff wrote: post #160
k8svet wrote: post #10

I remember this project starting. Not one single thing has changed that affects me as a result and I use Linux everywhere, daily. As far as I can tell it's a lot of small, niche work, that is almost completely immaterial to average users. Meanwhile there's no stop scroll events across the ecosystem. The single biggest win that Linux touchpad needs is stop scroll events. I'll bite my tongue on passing more judgement o…

Depends on what you decided to use I guess. The touchpad experience is neat on gnome on wayland on a macbook/surface.

Right, I've looked before and happy to be corrected but none of that is the result of this project. In fact, the gestures present in GNOME, today, have been there since before the first blog post in this series.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#256

Post by IshKebab »

asoneth wrote: post #251
IshKebab wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By sending their laptop to shops and reviewers for people to try? There are plenty of PC manufacturers that aren't "some random PC manufacturer". ThinkPad, Asus, Acer, HP, Dell. They are known brands that can easily maintain reputations.

I've read PC reviews that do point out when a touchpad is abysmal or excellent, or list models with good touchpads ( https://www.windowscentral.com/best-laptop-touchpad ) but near as I can tell most customers aren't willing to spend more money on a model with an excellent touchpad so it's not surprising that most manufacturers don't bother adding them except possibly on their premium lines. I would also wager that th…

> as I can tell most customers aren't willing to spend more money on a model with an excellent touchpad so it's not surprising that most manufacturers don't bother adding them except possibly on their premium lines.

Of course, I don't think anyone would expect an Apple level touchpad on a budget Windows laptop. But they don't even seem to be on premium Windows laptops.

You're probably right that premium Windows laptops are a super niche market so there isn't much incentive for touchpad manufacturers to cater to it. That's one huge advantage Apple has. If they want a product that no manufacturers want to make, they can just make it themselves.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#257

Post by asoneth »

IshKebab wrote: post #256
asoneth wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read PC reviews that do point out when a touchpad is abysmal or excellent, or list models with good touchpads ( https://www.windowscentral.com/best-laptop-touchpad ) but near as I can tell most customers aren't willing to spend more money on a model with an excellent touchpad so it's not surprising that most manufacturers don't bother adding them except possibly on their premium lines. I would also wager that th…

> as I can tell most customers aren't willing to spend more money on a model with an excellent touchpad so it's not surprising that most manufacturers don't bother adding them except possibly on their premium lines. Of course, I don't think anyone would expect an Apple level touchpad on a budget Windows laptop. But they don't even seem to be on premium Windows laptops. You're probably right that premium Windows lapto…

> But they don't even seem to be on premium Windows laptops.

Yeah, from that my conclusion is that the market for Windows laptops with really excellent touchpads is simply not large enough to be worth pursuing. My guess is that the increase in revenue between a "good enough touchpad" and "really excellent touchpad" is nowhere near enough to cover the astronomical costs of developing one.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#258

Post by crotchfire »

sandreas wrote: post #211
tannhaeuser wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth mentioning that before libinput, the synapse driver handled kinetic scroll very well IMO, but AIU the developers removed the device-specific coefficients and other parameters because they said it couldn't be tested and became a mess or something. I remember looking at my Linux (Wayland, gnome3) notebook in anticipation of physical pain, at which point I switched to Mac OS permanently. To this date, I still don'…

While is may be true from a user perspective, this "kinetic scrolling simulation" was removed, because it could lead to unexpected behaviour. Example: If you where scrolling in a window, the driver kept sending scroll events for a short time to simulate kinetic scrolling. Now, if you moved the cursor to another window, the other window started scrolling, because of the simulated events. This is not the case on macOS.…

Putting the effort on the shoulders of App developers instead of solving it at one place leads to so much wasted developer time, that could have been put into new features or solved issues. I was shocked about how nobody seemed to notice that.

However, they are not "hobby" at all. Peter Hutterer is awesome and he understands the problem very well - but as a single developer it's hard to convince a whole community

Wait what?

I'm pretty sure Hutterer was the one who pushed it into the App layer. He's the maintainer of libinput, and refused to do kinetic scroll within libinput (like the libsynapse driver did for X11). If he wanted to do it centrally in libinput there's nobody else to block him from doing that -- he can just do it.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#259

Post by crotchfire »

sandreas wrote: post #227
jmole wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, if you moved the cursor to another window, the other window started scrolling, because of the simulated events. This is such a trivial thing to fix, you just stop sending scroll events when the cursor moves. Peter has done a great job on libinput for the most part, but he is 100% wrong about inertial scrolling (and button remapping, among a few other things).

> Peter has done a great job on libinput for the most part, but he is 100% wrong about inertial scrolling (and button remapping, among a few other things). Maybe you're right. However, this should not about individual persons / projects... this is more about that I'm still uncertain, why so many experts cannot get this thing right by just working together finding a suitable solution :-) There must by more than one wa…

that the "driver" (libinput) should not send "simulated" events

As long as they are marked as being synthetic, why not?

If you mark them with a "this is a synthetic event" bit, the compositor/windowmanager has all the information it needs to decide whether or not to ignore the event (because, for example, the pointer moved out of one window and into another).

The driver generates the synthetic events, the compositor/windowmanager decides whether or not to drop them. Done.

Re: Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

#260

Post by crotchfire »

sandreas wrote: post #212
pmontra wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu from 2009 to 2022, 08.10 to 22.04, then switched to Debian, but I never noticed any problem. I always used X11, a laptop, touchpad and two finger scrolling. Maybe is it a Wayland thing? Or it is very subjective.

Noticing a problem and having smooth / improved scrolling are two different things. I think you can only notice the difference if you've ever used a macOS device with a trackpad for more than 2 weeks and then switched back to either Windows or Linux. It's just feels HORRIBILE for some people (like me). The interesting thing: Some Distributions have smooth scrolling (or interial scrolling / kinetic scrolling) by defau…

Smooth scrolling is something completely different, having to do with mousewheels.

Please don't perpetuate the awful terminological confusion around this issue.

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