Linux Touchpad Like MacBook Update: 2023 Progress on Smooth Scrolling

Also, at 15×9 cm, it has over 5 times the area of the teensy trackpad on my old ThinkPad R61, which is just 5.5×4.8 cm.

I don't think linux will overtake apple on the desktop (which actually includes notebook and laptops) but the current state has been good enough for a few years. And I'm not saying it is good enough only in terms of it being ready or well rounded, I mean in terms of marketshare. Linux has surpassed the 4% mark in globalstats last month and combined with chromeOS (with which it share many drivers) had peaks above 7% last year; it is very likely that the record will be broken this year. Of course, globalstats may be inaccurate, but I guess it is a good picture of the trends.

This has had an interesting consequence: it is no longer a good idea to ignore linux on the desktop; at least not for hardware vendors. It's been a long time since I last saw a consolidated laptop with anything not working out of the box. In the software side, linux is still ignored by some big name vendors, namely adobe, microsoft and game studios. That point is still sad.

Now, considering most developers software are multiplatform and, besides games, most entertainment runs on the browser, the last obstacle is still software. As linux' usage grows (and although very slow, it grows increasingly faster), vendors will eventually have to change their minds about linux on the desktop. Nevertherless I don't think that will happen before the end of this decade, also I don't think will see linux beating windows or even mac on the desktop. But, since I'm not dependent on any non-multiplatform software, I really don't care: the current situation (even in terms of marketshare and the way it has been continually improving) is good enough for me and has been for some years already.

I'm into "Linux touchpad with more tweakable and accessible parameters," or "Linux touchpad with better gesture support," but described like this, it's the type of thing I would ignore or not even hear about until it was an abandoned/dead project. I simply wouldn't realize that it's something useful for me to support. I exclusively use touchpads and Linux desktops, and while I've been frustrated at not being able to get the touchpad to feel like I would ideally want, if it felt like a Mac touchpad I would hate it.

A bunch of parameters that you can tweak to imitate MacBooks? Yes, please. A switch to turn your touchpad into a Mac touchpad? Who cares other than people who are only forced to use Linux for development on the job because their preferred Mac is too nerfed to allow them to allow them to get their work done?

As a larger statement, it seems that the strain of "What will make Linux catch on is making it more like Macs" has largely died off, largely because the people who want Macs buy Macs. It's a tactic as likely to be as successful as the "making Firefox indistinguishable from Chrome will make Chrome users switch to Firefox" pretense, and gets as much development support as the "making GIMP exactly like Photoshop" projects. The Firefox thing wouldn't have happened if they weren't completely funded by Google, and people who like Photoshop prefer Photoshop and aren't going to work on GIMP.

You can't really put "better touchpad" on a label... or can you?

[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.