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Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

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Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#81

Post by MrLeftHand »

One of the main reasons I stopped using Linux is the touchpad! It is horrible out of the box experience and the insult to injury is the lack of no good user interface to even set anything. You have to screw around with libinput or xinput with zero documentation on both parts and hope you will hit a sweet spot eventually and hope that any future updates won't break it.

I am way past of the tinkerer phase where I would enjoy spending a week on trying to make something work under Linux just so I can feel better. Or the patience where I waited for 1.5 years just to have proper support for the AGP slot on my motherboard.

I want a Linux system that works out of the box and has no problems with standard features like a touchpad.

Under Windows 10 the new precision drivers are fantastic, very close to Mac comfort. Whoever creates something similar under Linux deserves a Nobel Prize and a monument.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#82

Post by inapis »

walrus01 wrote: post #74
inapis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really depends on their comfort/paranoia level. If the device is taken out of their sight for more than a few minutes, they'd be highly suspicious. More so if you are crossing borders of countries known to be hostile.

> Really depends on their comfort/paranoia level. If the device is taken out of their sight for more than a few minutes, they'd be highly suspicious. If your expected adversary is a nation-state intelligence agency, what do you expect to do? Take your laptop with you everywhere you go, all the time? Leave in your apartment for a theoretical attacker to execute an evil maid attack on it? FDE is highly useful against o…

You are considering only the extremes. There's also a ground between ordinary adversaries and nation-state agencies.

Take for example China. There are plenty of rumours about business executives taking throw-away electronics while crossing the border or how China installs some random software on people's devices when crossing a border neighbouring a certain province[1]

FDE can also lead to increased suspicion when crossing a border and refusal to unlock the system can pretty much lead to a denial of entry or, worse, detention. FDE also doesn't help in cases when a random border crossing can require installing a malicious boot-loader or a persistent malware somewhere in the system.

In the China story, they might not be installing a persistent bootloader but there's nothing really stopping them from doing that.

Honestly, in certain cases (and I'd rather say, a lot of cases) it's just easier to have no device than deal with what they did to your device after the fact or just sell the device after entering if you are suspicious of it.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ne94dg/jingwang-a...

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#83

Post by qeng-ho »

scandox wrote: post #73
scandox wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks I will try that out though my Emacs-hands may get confused.

I think maybe this is the problem I would pay $100,000 to solve / improve? https://imgur.com/a/7axkPSW

Switch to using numbers for the quick links and you can type the text of the link to narrow down the search for the quick link.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#84

Post by isostatic »

sneak wrote: post #24
isostatic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The touchpad on my macbook pro is just such an amazing feature, so intuitive. So 'just right' Do you find the original scrolling mechanism, or the reversed scrolling mechanism, to be "just right"?

The original one is the reversed one. Fingers go up, content goes down. That’s wrong as anyone who has used a phone or tablet can tell you. They fixed it, so now it is indeed “just right”.

Depends if you think you're moving the document, or moving the viewport. Touchscreen behaviour is touching the document and moving it up, while your view remains the same. Traditional scroll behavior is that you're moving the view of your document down while the document itself doesn't move.

Either way, one method is "the original one", the other method is the opposite, or reversed, from the original method.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#85

Post by pas »

acchow wrote: post #23
isostatic wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who prefers the nipples on thinkpads?

I used thinkpad nipples for 5+ years. Macbook took a couple months of adjustment. But there is almost no use of muscle whatsoever when moving the mouse on a macbook. Thinkpads feel incredibly straining in comparison now. And scrolling on a macbook...completely effortless. There is nothing like it.

I'm using a Dell Latitude E7440 for years now with Linux, and scrolling is effortless. I'm really intrigued by what exactly the MBP scroll does better.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#86

Post by ramijames »

101km wrote: post #11

I have been using 12" MacBooks since they came out because I live out of a backpack and travel a lot. I cannot find anything comparable in terms of size/weight/battery and build quality. Especially the trackpad, nothing is remotely close. Otherwise I'd get that and put Arch on it. People complain Apple is expensive, not so sure. The TCO may actually be less because of the high resale value. It is also more convenient…

Can you tell me more about "curl-to-bash"?

Setting up my mac can be a matter of days and I hate it.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#87

Post by kimdotcom »

yabb wrote: post #51
ahartmetz wrote: post #49

A cheap mouse allows finer and faster control than the best touchpad that currently exists, so... I plug in a mouse. (Don't believe me? Play an FPS game with touchpad against a mouse user.) That said, Synaptics touchpad support on Linux is bad. In my case, it's the touchpad on a Thinkpad T440s. It can run in a legacy/standard protocol mode or a "modern" protocol mode. Linux supposedly supports the latter (where palm…

The macbook touchpad is so good that after a few months of practice, I routinely used to top the leaderboard in cod4 hardcore free for all using double tap to aim down the sight, shoot with index finger and aim with middle finger. I even got good at quickscoping with the Barrett 50 Cal, again using only the macbook touchpad. Even mile high club on veteran was not out of reach

I would love to watch a split-screen video of this, CoD screen and your finger gestures during play.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#88

Post by staffordrj »

sjwright wrote: post #37
isostatic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The touchpad on my macbook pro is just such an amazing feature, so intuitive. So 'just right' Do you find the original scrolling mechanism, or the reversed scrolling mechanism, to be "just right"?

Both were right. The original direction made some sense when transitioning from mice with scroll wheels. (Though it is debatable whether the mouse wheel's direction was ever right.) The current "reversed" direction makes more sense in an era of iPads, smartphones and touch screens.

Both are right. The original makes sense when using a mouse. The reversed makes sense on touch screens. I use both.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#89

Post by beaconstudios »

ramijames wrote: post #86
101km wrote: post #11

I have been using 12" MacBooks since they came out because I live out of a backpack and travel a lot. I cannot find anything comparable in terms of size/weight/battery and build quality. Especially the trackpad, nothing is remotely close. Otherwise I'd get that and put Arch on it. People complain Apple is expensive, not so sure. The TCO may actually be less because of the high resale value. It is also more convenient…

Can you tell me more about "curl-to-bash"? Setting up my mac can be a matter of days and I hate it.

I think they mean the classic install process of "curl -s | bash", used to download and then execute a bash script. The real question in my opinion is what kind of tools can fully set up an entire environment, including sessions, from a bash script? Homebrew only gets you so far.

Re: Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

#90

Post by ghaff »

isostatic wrote: post #3

Am I the only one who prefers the nipples on thinkpads?

For years, they were the only things I would use. I could never effectively use trackpads until I got my first MacBook which had the first one I actively liked rather than barely tolerated.

These days, I still have a Lenovo X200 for Linux and still use the pointer there although I'm generally happy with trackpads across the board. (Except on Windows apparently. I had to get a mouse for my 17" Alienware laptop because the trackpad still drove me crazy.)

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