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Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

rachelbythebay.com

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

#61

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…

> In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type.

In KDE: system settings -> input devices -> touchpad -> disable while typing. (this is enabled by default)

In Gnome: I'm not using it, but apparently https://askubuntu.com/questions/923060/how-to-disable-touchp...

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

#62
post #17

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 switching between mbp and xps15 and honestly couldn't describe the difference. They're slightly different, but I wouldn't call either one "better".

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

#63

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.

Nothing. macOS simply implements touchpad gestures in continuous way as opposed to binary triggers, does it consistently across applications since most of it is handled by toolkit and comes with sane defaults that are harder to accidentally misconfigure than on other systems. Those things contribute to perceived user experience, but there's no real reason other than lack of software polish that it couldn't be like th…

That “nothing” is everything.

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

#64

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…

> 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 interaction.

I have this problem as well. The Synaptics driver seems to have some palm detection logic but it does nothing. Perhaps my trackpad has no support for it.

> They swap recipes for how to disable the touchpad completely.

Sadly the surface I usually place my laptop on doesn't have space for a mouse...

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

#65

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

My laptop has a Synaptics trackpad and came with Windows pre-installed. Trackpad acceleration was really comfortable on Windows. It all changed when I installed Linux. Tried adjusting the Synaptics driver settings but couldn't get it to match the Windows experience.

So what causes this difference? Is the Windows driver just better than the Linux driver?

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type. In KDE: system settings -> input devices -> touchpad -> disable while typing. (this is enabled by default) In Gnome: I'm not using it, but apparently https://askubuntu.com/questions/923060/how-to-disable-touchp...

Yeah, but then you've got an arbitrary pause before you can use it again.

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

#68

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

What's wrong with the synaptics driver? It's the first thing I installed over stock Ubuntu, to make it even tolerable. Whereas with libinput, after only minutes of use, I noticed I actively avoid using the touchpad, subconsciously bracing for pain and frustration in advance. Is there a reason that libinput is so horrible? I'm not even sure if it's only gnome's/tweak tool's anemic settings dialog, or fundamental lack…

Meh, libinput works fine for me. I suspect it's pretty hardware-dependent.

From reading around, most of the distros started deprecating synaptics because it wasn't actively being worked on, didn't work with Wayland, required root for a bunch of stuff unnecessarily etc.

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

#69

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…

For me it was MSDN discs and a Charles Perzold book. Made a tree on MFC!
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