Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update

https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-macbook-pro-may-2020-update/

by wbharding • 6 years ago

314 322 6 years ago

bill.harding.blog

nbrempel3• 6 years ago

It’s funny that people want this so badly that the site has been down for me the whole time it’s been on the front page yet it’s still getting upvoted to the top.

nickthemagicman2• 6 years ago

Same here. Linux trackpad as good as Mac is tech porn.

ntry• 6 years ago

Hahaha, that's so true. I've heard of multiple people placing bounties on making this a reality

digikata• 6 years ago

System76 and Purism know something to work on improving now...

nbrempel3• 6 years ago

I was just thinking about that! System76 would be wise to put some resources towards this.

danso2• 6 years ago

Someone made an archive.is snapshot that's accessible while the live site is down: http://archive.is/FGHTT

i_am_proteus• 6 years ago

Am I the only one who doesn't get this? Trackpads on Linux with various Thinkpads have always seemed fine. I've used trackpads on various Mac laptops (Pro and Air) and those have seemed fine also. To round things out, my experience with trackpads on Windows (Thinkpads and XPS) has been that they are fine.

Admittedly I have Linux set up for keyboard use with a TWM, but the trackpads, when I used them, have been fine.

danso2• 6 years ago

In a previous post, the author mentions a few benchmarks comparing Mac vs Linux trackpad performance: https://archive.is/s7SZM

1. Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing. As of today, I can consistently score twice as high on macOS (average score 250 with “Hard” + “Small” options) vs Linux (average score ~100).

2. Visual or terminal-based means to configure rudimentary touchpad settings. The fewest options I could imagine supporting for v1 would be: scroll speed/acceleration, scroll speed, natural scrolling toggle, hopefully support for gestures.

3. First-class palm and thumb detection/ignoring

cycloptic4• 6 years ago

Number 1 seems wildly subjective based on the person's level of dexterity and the hardware used. The only way I could see that being meaningful if you did it on the exact same laptop side by side with Mac and Linux and tweaked the acceleration profile, but it doesn't actually sound like the author is talking about installing Linux on a macbook.

Numbers 2 and 3 are already in libinput. I am still struggling to understand what it is the author feels they need to fork the project for; there is some additional software that needs to be provided to really get the mac-like desktop experience with gestures, but that is covered by the libinput-gestures project. https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures

blauditore3• 6 years ago

Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing

It looks like this doesn't take viewport size into account. A smaller window still shows dots of the same size, just distributed over a smaller area. Given that it's (more) idiomatic to maximize windows under Linux and Windows than under MacOS, those results could be skewed.

vzaliva• 6 years ago

From somebody who worked on touch intefraces: #1 could be hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads detects finger coordinates in firmware and send them to driver. Driver has not much to do to improve accuracy besides some high-level smoothing like Kalman filter. #2 is could be useful. Not that tools are completely lacking, but they can use some polish and unification. #3 is again hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads do palm detection in firmware. Nothing you can do to improve that. In the most cases it is not even possible to get a "raw" sensor reading.

N_A_T_E• 6 years ago

You might be less sensitive to the lag. I've seen annoyingly slow responsiveness on most recent dell laptops running windows or linux.

diffeomorphism2• 6 years ago

Lag of what precisely? The touchpad, the driver, the software or how it is rendered?

ysr23• 6 years ago

Thinkpads

There is a much better option than the trackpad mac or otherwise built in ;-)

blauditore3• 6 years ago

I feel the same. It almost seems like a meme to me by now.

I've used various different laptops (Macbooks, Windows machines, Linux-based ones, Chromebooks), and while the experience was certainly different, Macbooks never felt particularly superior. They seem to be configured (by default) to move cursors fairly slowly compared to the competition, but it's a lot about just getting used to it. There are of course some cheap, jumpy touchpads out there, but this doesn't apply to all non-Macbooks, by far.

skrtskrt3• 6 years ago

I just booted a MacBook Air into Mint recently and I think I finally figured out what the difference is:

Mac allows the cursor to move quickly, but where it differs & excels is how fast it decelerates or stops the cursor.

On Linux, I am always overshooting what I'm trying to click on even when I make the mouse tracking speed very very slow. On Mac I can keep the tracking speed high and jump around quickly but still manage to stop right where I need to every time.

So either, it's faster to register you're slowing down/stopping OR it slows down at a faster rate than your finger is slowing down (vs faithfully tracking your finger)... or both?

Edit: This is true for the handling of external mice too, it's not just the trackpad. The difference is night and day, and overshooting things is frustrating with a normal mouse as well as the touchpad.

slac• 6 years ago

are the chromeOS touchpad drivers open source?

kimikelku• 6 years ago

I have a thinkpad X1 1gen and the trackpad in almost every distro is really bad. Single tap moves the mouse, making me fail almost every click on small things.

kitotik3• 6 years ago

As a loooooong time mac user recently using Linux as a daily driver again, it’s pretty bad. I would compare it to voice recognition: the difference between “90% there” and “95% there” is quite vast.

In addition to multi finger gestures, the biggest gaps for me are general handling of inertia, scrolling smoothness, ignoring accidental touches, fine grained pointer accuracy, and handling of alt-clicks(two finger right click, three finger middle-click, etc).

Again, it works, and is usable, but it feels like it was finished before the bar was raised on the trackpad User Experience.

mrspeaker• 6 years ago

For various reasons I've had to alternate between 2017 macbook pro and linux thinkpads - using only one or the other for a few months at a time (mac for 3 months, then thinkpad 3 months).

I didn't know there was a "trackpad meme" - but to me the thinkpad is fine, but unquestionably more frustrating than the mac. I've tried to tweak things but never made it feel good.

I even set up a camera at one point to try and figure out what was causing my frustrations. Looking at the footage I noticed even though the thinkpad felt slower (or a bit "sluggish"?) I would still often slightly over-shoot my target.

I can't figure out exactly why it's different but it sure feels like some sort of black magic on the macs part.

filleduchaos• 6 years ago

My Macbook's trackpad is the only trackpad I've ever used that felt almost as good as using my phone's screen.

CoolGuySteve2• 6 years ago

It depends on the trackpad. I think part of the issue is that Linux doesn’t have much calibration beyond what the firmware on the trackpad is reporting.

The other issue is that PC laptops tend to have much smaller trackpads for whatever reason, allowing for less room for fine adjustments after swiping.

My old Asus UX305 feels as good as a Mac, the trackpad is large, the scrolling has momentum and feels good, etc.

On the other hand, my HP Envy trackpad is terrible, the palm detection doesn’t work well, the trackpad itself is too small to aim properly, the acceleration is pretty high and hard to aim. It almost seems like the team responsible for the design of the laptop never considered what it would be like to use such a small trackpad.

diffeomorphism2• 6 years ago

Also don't quite get it, but I think this is only about the software side. For example gestures with more than two fingers, better scrolling (continuous not steps).

geon2• 6 years ago

I have no idea about linux, scrolling on windows is pretty much hardcoded to use a early 2000s scroll wheel mouse.

Because of their low resolution, windows scrolling is done one text line at a time, while macs scroll a pixel at a time.

This sounds superficial, but it is really not. With the higher resolution, you get a very direct connection with the scrolled content. Without this almost tactile feedback, inertial scrolling doesn’t work at all.

And since scrolling is like 90 % of what I use a trackpad for, I will not even consider using windows with a trackpad until they have fixed it.

jon-wood• 6 years ago

The tactile feedback comes from the fact Mac OS has the concept of a scroll having an amount of inertia behind it, if I very gently move two fingers up and down on a long web page then it will very gently move a few pixels, but if I flick two fingers from the bottom of the touchpad to the top then its going to go flying upwards. If I then put a finger down on the touchpad it'll stop the scroll immediately.

This behaviour one of the things in Mac OS that nobody really notices because it feels so intuitive, but if you took it away everyone would be puzzling over why scrolling feels broken.

chapium• 6 years ago

Is this why touchpad scrolling is so crazy in LibreOffice? On windows, mouse and scrollwheel works fine in Libre. Using touchpad it shoots the document to the moon each time scrolling gestures are applied.

There is not a similar effect in other applications.

dylan-m• 6 years ago

I feel like things are a little better in the regular users (modern stock GNOME) chunk of Linux land: Wayland / GDK / GTK handle touchpad gestures as well as "smooth" scroll events, which are sent in combination with regular (coarse-grained) touchpad scroll events. Works out of the box in GTK 3 applications, so as an application developer all you have to do (if you're targeting GNOME) is not use a dead version of GTK :b GTK 3 even does scroll inertia: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkScrolledWindow.ht.... Firefox started supporting this stuff recently, as well.

I think the story is similar for Windows, but a little less satisfying since their hodepodge of UI toolkits starts from the very core, whereas at least with modern desktop Linux distros the core apps are generally implemented the same way.

Alas, mouse wheels are a whole other story. Pixel perfect scroll wheels have been a thing for a while, and Windows actually has support for these (not that it works anywhere). Support in Linux has been progressing at a similarly glacial pace, but it looks really promising. That's one spot where Apple is definitely years ahead. (If only they would make a practical mouse…).

seltzered_3• 6 years ago

"scrolling on windows is pretty much hardcoded to use a early 2000s scroll wheel mouse"

No longer true. Windows 10 works pretty well as long you use precision trackpad, or use an apple touchpad with a third party driver (https://github.com/imbushuo/mac-precision-touchpad , https://magicutilities.net )

spatulon• 6 years ago

My experience is that palm rejection on my Mac laptop works flawlessly (I literally cannot remember ever having an issue with my palm interfering), but on my Dell/Win10 I get frustrated on a daily basis.

bxparks• 6 years ago

I don't know about Thinkpads, but I've owned over a dozen Dell laptops. Their touchpads have been between Terrible to OK on Linux. Until my most recent Dell, the Precision 5510 (the business version of XPS 15). Finally almost as good as a Mac, but very slightly not as good on palm rejection.

I stopped buying Macs due to the ESC key, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the removal of USB-A ports, so I'm very happy to have the Precision 55xx options.

Strangely enough, my only other laptop whose trackpad as almost as good as the Mac is my cheapo Chromebook.

Frondo• 6 years ago

I get it, but I also get why lots of people don't. There is something of a subjectivity in "what feels good" for using a hardware interface device, which some people simply won't notice. Sort of like the difference between a pretty UI and an ugly one (assuming the function is the same), some people care and some people don't. Neither one is wrong, but experience isn't universal.

seltzered_3• 6 years ago

I've been testing out various flavors of Linux (Ubuntu 20.04, Pop!OS, etc.) this past week on both a fairly new Thinkpad and a Macbook Pro and the trackpad experience is horrible compared to Windows or MacOS.

Things I've noticed:

- Mouse jumps after thumb-clicking.

- Thumb doesn't get ignored when doing certain combination actions (thumb + click and drag to select multiple items).

- Scrolling isn't 'inertial'

- Mousing around lacks some of the accelation/deceleration that makes getting around a screen easier.

(bias: I spent a lot of time thinking about the mac touchpad and once wrote an app leveraging it's privateframework data).

I'm really tempted to find time to help on this effort, but it likely requires getting another machine since I can't see myself living in linux full-time for a while.

Mikeb854• 6 years ago

Interesting list. Seems we use a touchpad differently because I don't use my thumb at all on it and don't like inertial scrolling or movement.

Scrolling isn't 'inertial'

It seems different applications have different scrolling settings. I'm on Ubuntu, on Firefox there is inertial scrolling (smooth scrolling setting), on Chrome there isn't.

ubercow132• 6 years ago

- Mouse jumps after thumb-clicking.

I get this one on Windows with my touchpad (with Microsoft's 'precision' driver) but not Linux.

One that I don't like about the Macbook touchpad is that the cursor won't move for a short period after clicking, which makes it hard to click stuff quickly

the_hoser8• 6 years ago

I doubt you're the only one, but maybe you automatically reach for a mouse when you have a laptop.

Let's put it this way: the one accessory that's in my Linux laptop's bag that isn't in my MacBook's bag is a wireless mouse.

WesolyKubeczek3• 6 years ago

The people who both think like this and are core developers of the input stack are literally the reason we cannot have nice things.

"Here, it's moving, what else do you want?"

The input experience in Linux is an example of the "Soviet style" pattern. Quoting the "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies" book:

"You have probably used some of these Soviet-style products that do more or less what they are intended to do but in a way that you find awkward or irritating. You find that the products’ usability is not what it should be; their look and feel is unattractive; they lack certain security aspects you feel are needed; or they contain cultural references you find disconcerting or offensive. These are failures to meet the products’ non-functional requirements—those that make them appealing to the humans who use them. Such requirements are every bit as important for eventual acceptance as the functional requirements."

Whys and hows of this are also explained in this attempt: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/172/. TL;DR is that to make a good design for anything, be it a city park, or a gas stove, or a software product, you need to widen your comfort zone to include other people besides yourself.

naringas• 6 years ago

I have a pretty decent trackpad experience on linux. grated it has been a little glitchy but not as much anymore..

in any case I blame propietary vendors for preventing better open source support.

3jckd• 6 years ago

Could someone ELI5, why it is so difficult to make it right? And I do not mean exclusively to Linux, because Windows has been horrible for years now too.

If the issue is hardware, then we'd blame OEMs.

If it's software, then we'd blame, say, Microsoft.

If it was a combination of these two, then we could say that Apple is the only one that controls both... if it wasn't for the Surface series which still has atrocious touchpad experience.

bzb3• 6 years ago

It is mostly software, but it's not Microsoft's fault, because they do not make the hardware and are not expected to write the drivers for it.

whywhywhywhy• 6 years ago

Surface trackpads feel very close to Apple ones these days so it's down to OEMs.

Although at this point I'd argue Microsoft should be forcing a minimum level of experience on all Windows devices and providing the software tools and hardware guidance needed to get there.

wlesieutre• 6 years ago

Windows is providing more of the touchpad software now, but you still have to depend on manufacturers to be compatible with it:

https://www.howtogeek.com/286905/what-is-a-precision-touchpa...

rconti3• 6 years ago

I guess that's our answer. They'd rather say "not our fault" than even try to solve it?

chrisseaton12• 6 years ago

If I was being uncharitable I'd say that the problem is that companies beside Apple just don't care about a good user experience. Maybe they could produce the same product if they thought it mattered. With almost all non-Apple laptops being flimsy, cheap-feeling plastic junk, stuffed full of ports and bezels, I feel like they're miles away from being at the stage where it makes sense to optimise the trackpad.

ashtonkem12• 6 years ago

Companies optimize towards whatever drives their customers buying decisions.

For some makers that’s going to be performance or cost. For businesses laptops reliability and security are going to be big factors.

For Apple the overall experience is a large part of why people buy; Apple users want a great hardware experience integrated into the OS, and they’re willing to sacrifice performance and price to get it.

soperj• 6 years ago

Like apple cares about a good keyboard?

thomashobohm7• 6 years ago

Have you seen any Windows laptops in the past five years? Many Windows ultrabooks rival Apple's in terms of "ports and bezels." The XPS 13, for example, has significantly thinner bezels than the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on, at a much more reasonable price.

twic• 6 years ago

stuffed full of ports

Imagine thinking this was a bad thing.

Traster• 6 years ago

This makes no sense whatsoever, firstly you have to ignore the thing less than a centimetre away from the trackpad - the keyboard that Apple completely fucked up for half a decade. Does Apple just not care about a good user experience?

Secondly, non-Apple laptops aren't cheap-feeling plastic junk. This is the classic "Let me compare my iPhone 11 Pro to this Alcatel 1" - well the iPhone 11 Pro is 25x the price. The Dell XPS 13 isn't cheap-feeling plastic junk, nor is the Thinkpad X1 carbon, nor is the Microsoft Surface Laptop. They're all premium products.

dkuntz2• 6 years ago

The exact opposite of an ELI5, but a very well written and in-depth overview on why touchpads suck outside of macOS: https://pavelfatin.com/scrolling-with-pleasure

the tl;dr is that when touchpads were added to windows, they used the legacy APIs which made assumptions about them being mouses with notched scroll wheels. And while microsoft has since released APIs which support high precision scrolling, applications have been slow to adopt them (sometimes because of wanting to be compatible with windows 7 and older).

AgloeDreams2• 6 years ago

Honestly, I think a lot of people forget the real reason:

In one corner, Apple got there by mainlining trackpad and trackpad software development...with iPhone touchscreen R&D. You have basically the largest R&D product in the world dictating the software that controls their trackpads. We are talking advanced finger speed and direction prediction (not just detection), AI to ignore unintended touches, and hardware and software that have been built specifically for them. It's no secret that all of Apple's laptops effectively have the same trackpad in various sizes and that the tech in the touchpad is nearly identical to to that in an iPhone minus a display. (Including the taptic engine and `3D Touch` aka, `Force Touch`.)

In the other corner, you have people with laptops by random companies with random hardware and drivers written by FOSS contributors/ Laptop ODMs/ Legacy Microsoft Drivers.

FOSS is fantastic, but it can't generally compete with a Billion dollar a year R&D budget stretched over 10 years feeding back improvements.

aikinai• 6 years ago

Mac trackpads have lightyears ahead of other vendors since before the iPhone, so this can’t be the primary reason.

readwind• 6 years ago

You're absolutely right. We're still young, though, so yeah, don't completely discourage FOSS etc I have high hopes. And I would be glad for Mac's Apple's successes, I just am sure that FOSS etc will catch "up" too. We are still young. Let's prais both apple and foss, it's not a question about winning, it's just existing. It's so easy to not choose apple or mac, and, so easy for those who want to go into the apple orchards. And that is great.

pier25• 6 years ago

OTOH mac trackpads were already much better than the competition even years before the iPhone existed.

WalterGR2• 6 years ago

Does Apple hold software patents that prevent trackpads and the trackpad experience from improving throughout the industry?

cycloptic4• 6 years ago

As an open source developer, it is very hard to support hardware that I don't actually own and can't test on.

It is also very hard to support obscure hardware that only has obfuscated closed-source drivers, or has no Linux drivers at all. This requires lots of trial-and-error and workarounds (in addition to the normal level of hardware-specific tweaks that have to go into something like libinput) and takes up a disproportionate amount of testing time. Some input devices fall in this category, such as those built into newer apple laptops.

DylanDmitri• 6 years ago

If old Surfaces had problems, the new ones don't. I've used a new MacBook and Surface daily for the last couple months, and the tracking performance and latency are indistinguishable. Haptic clicking is better on the Mac though.

solarkraft4• 6 years ago

Still atrocious touchpad experience? If you discount the constant jumping around, which I experienced on every precision driver touchpad I have used (about 4, including a Macbook. Are MS complete idiots or is this another one of the problems normal people don't notice?!?!?!?!) my experience with them has actually been very good. The response is way more direct than on Linux and quite precise as well. Application support for scrolling is not great, but not horrible either (browsers, more popular MS apps and JetBrains IDEs work).

ubercow132• 6 years ago

Nope, I also have that problem. The same touchpad on Linux works flawlessly though.

chongli• 6 years ago

I think it’s due to the organizational structure of Apple which gives them a huge advantage over everyone else. In the Linux world, people point the finger at the driver developers who in turn point the finger at the hardware makers and firmware developers. Apple, on the other hand, has all of these folks working together, all the way up the stack to the UI toolkit and application layers.

I fear that Linux touchpad support is a victim of Conway’s law [1] which means this problem can’t be solved by one specific team. It may mean rewriting the whole stack (and rewriting applications as a result).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

baq2• 6 years ago

except the culture of secrecy where you can't see your own bug reports after you file them [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218413

bregma• 6 years ago

Microsoft tried to compete with Apple by dictating to hardware vendors how they should write drivers for their touch input devices (the Microsoft HID guidelines). Of course, none of the hardware vendors could actually write drivers that fully conform to this standard, and the standard itself was not wholly adequate to compete with Apple. It causes problems.

Linux slavishly adheres to the published Microsoft HID guidelines. Since neither Microsoft nor any of the hardware vendors do, it causes problems.

The Microsoft HID guidelines dictate how packets of information are reported to userspace. That is information like touch id, touch size, velocity, and direction. The userspace then has to integrate the various data into touch and gesture recognition. A thousand different software developers do that a thousand different ways, mostly badly.

The end result in the Windows and Linux world is a thousand different developers produce touch and gesture recognition software a thousand different ways of hundreds of different devices that work in completely different ways. A sort of orchestrated chaos like an ant colony.

Apple dictated to its hardware vendors exactly how to write drivers that work with its software, and it has centralized software embedded in the OS to handle touch. A dozen expert developers do touch and gesture recognition for all apps using strictly controlled drivers from a select few vendors, all centrally controlled like a massive flock of starlings swooping and gliding and conducted by the ghost of Steve Jobs standing on the ground.

Dunedan• 6 years ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23039515, although the author apparently changed the title of the blog post.

Brakenshire2• 6 years ago

It was posted there while it was a draft on his blog, before it was actually finished. The links which were the purpose of the post hadn’t been setup yet.

I presume nobody is randomly visiting pages on bill.harding.blog, so you aren't seeing this.

Kamshak• 6 years ago

For those only reading comments, the author plans to hire a developer to address touchpad issues. You can help:

- Take the Linux Touchpad Experience Poll: https://www.gitclear.com/polls/linux_touchpad_experience

- Become a sponsor on GitHub: https://github.com/gitclear/libinput (GitHub matches every donation up to $5k, so your $5 can become $10)

- Get paid $50/hr to work on libinput: http://archive.is/FGHTT (link to archive of the original article ty danso)

ah-• 6 years ago

It took me a while to find how to sponsor, the button is right next to Star/Watch.

Or go straight here: https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

91edec• 6 years ago

Never sponsored a project before. I keep getting a 500 error on Github when trying to pay.

jamil74• 6 years ago

I wanted to read the article too but it looks like the site is having issues, thanks for the links!

dmayle• 6 years ago

Touch on linux has always been a pet peeve of mine (I was the first to publish two-finger right click patches[1] for the synaptics driver http://wikigentoo.ksiezyc.pl/Synaptics_Touchpad.htm ). I've long thought about fixing the current drivers, but I can't prioritize the time myself. I'll donate some cash.

Luckily, this should be relatively simple. Anyone who wants to make this should be looking at the Chromium touchpad code (runs linux, and my Pixelbook touchpad is as good as a macbook touchpad. For example, the touch input filter: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/touch_... )

I think you'd get most of the quality with a kalman filter (A really cool filter that takes unstable input, and corrects it based on probabilities to give very high quality output).

[1] http://douglas.mayle.org/files/synaptics-two-finger-click.di...

Ballas2• 6 years ago

On that note - does the synaptics driver not have all of the functionality the author wants - as long as he is willing to do the tweaking to the synclient settings?

(I have not used my touchpad since getting used to a trackpoint, but I vaguely remember using the synaptics driver to get it usable)

Edit: NVM, I read another one of his blog posts where he addresses synaptics and mtrack.

freedomben2• 6 years ago

Thanks, I can't access the archive.is or the main site, so even tho I prefer to read the source I can't :-)

I think $50/hr might not be enough. I imagine there are very few devs who could do this correctly, doubling the wage and halving the time would cost the same but probably yield better results. I'm not the one paying tho.

bananicorn2• 6 years ago

I have these settings in my .xinitrc on my ThinkPad T420, but never had to do anything terribly arcane to get it to work as I expect it to.

    exec xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'Synaptics Tap Action' 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 &
    exec xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling' 1 1 &
    exec xinput set-prop 'TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint' 'libinput Accel Speed' -.3 &
    exec xinput set-prop 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad' 'Synaptics Coasting Speed' 0 0 &

Sure, it could be more fine-tuned, but it works just fine that way.

On other laptops I've had to reduce the "finger size" (I can't remember the name of the setting), so I could use it even with a light touch, but that's the biggest problem I've had with it so far.

BenjiWiebe• 6 years ago

Are you actually using exec before each xinput command? If so, only your first xinput command actually gets run. exec replaces the currently running process, effectively making it run-this-and-exit.

madars• 6 years ago

Looks like & saves the day by invoking the command in a subshell and then in that subshell exec replaces the subshell with the xinput command. E.g. you can test it by

    $ cat ./a.sh 
    #!/bin/sh
    exec /bin/echo foo &
    exec /bin/echo bar &

which outputs foo and bar. Seems like a special case, just like exec without a command for file descriptor redirection.

bananicorn2• 6 years ago

That's rather interesting - it does work, I can tell you that much, but maybe there's a more standard way of doing this :)

ghostpepper4• 6 years ago

Count me among those who agree there is a vast gulf. Another thing I've noticed recently is that on my X1 carbon (7th gen) there is a small but noticeably distance when I first start dragging a finger before the cursor moves that does not exist on a Mac trackpad with MacOS.

I also wonder what the experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad. Is it closer to the experience on MacOS or closer to the experience with Linux on commodity hardware? If the latter, maybe it makes sense to improve that first.

Maybe not though, if the synergy between hardware and software is the "secret sauce" that's missing then maybe optimizing the mac trackpad for Linux would be wasted effort.

dhruvkar• 6 years ago

> experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad

I ran Lubuntu on a 2012 macbook pro for a couple years and it was much closer to an "Apple" experience compared to my current setup of Pop_OS on a P52S Thinkpad.

the_hoser8• 6 years ago

To satisfy your curiosity about the performance of the MacBook Pro's touchpad in Linux... it's not great, especially if you just recently used it in OS X.

gen220• 6 years ago

I plug my magic trackpad 2 into my first-gen x1 carbon, and it works remarkably well for scrolling, clicking, getting around.

I miss some of the multi-touch features (three-finger-swipe-up) but it's pretty much identical excepting those. When I close the lid and plug in to a monitor, you can't tell much of a difference.

davidandgoliath• 6 years ago

Fwiw, the latest fedora manages to make the carbon's trackpad feel as good as a macbook: Might be worth trying it out.

srfwx• 6 years ago

Try fusuma (https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma) to get 3/4 fingers swipe and pinch

scollet• 6 years ago

Ran Linux on a MBP and had about the same experience as my thinkpad. It was when I reinstalled MacOS that I had a serious user shock. After configuring there was still a noticeable quality of life disparity between the two and I spent the next couple months training myself to deal with it while pining for Linux.

cyberbully88• 6 years ago

This is most likely a palm detection feature: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/blob/mast...

Very annoying "feature" and the worst part is that it can not be disabled nor there are any plans on putting it behind a toggle flag, see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/19...

Luckily it can easily be patched on your own.

computerfriend• 6 years ago

I run Linux on one MBP and MacOS on another and I have a dissenting opinion that the MBP trackpad on Linux actually behaves extremely well. I have an X1 too and find the trackpad horrible in comparison.

jonahbenton2• 6 years ago

Experience report and speculation-

I have used Linux (fedora-xfce) inside VMWare Fusion on Mac laptops on a daily basis for at least the last decade, and also have run Linux on Thinkpad and System76 hardware from time to time.

In general I find the trackpad experience of Linux-inside-VMWare-on-Mac to be basically identical to that directly on Mac, and much (much) better than either Linux on Thinkpad or on System 76.

There is some oddness in the VMWare setup- in the VMWare parent process, over time, RAM usage grows, and a slight lag is introduced into the UI experience inside Linux (both trackpad and keyboard).

When this gets too noticeable, I kill the VMWare parent (which does not kill the actual VMs), then restart it. The lag is eliminated, the memory leak is cleaned up, and the child VMs are not impacted.

I imagine the abstracted event flow to be:

HW -> Mac driver -> VMWare user space UI loop -> Linux generic driver -> Linux userspace

while the Linux only event flow would be

HW -> Linux driver -> Linux userspace

While there is some jankiness in VMWare's delivery of events to the generic Linux driver that the kernel uses for the VMWare "hardware", the work happening in the Mac driver is the magic that delivers great experience.

jonahbenton2• 6 years ago

LOL ridiculous downvote.

pfranz• 6 years ago

I few months ago I tried really hard to get smooth-scrolling on a Macbook pro running Windows/Linux vms. I was testing against VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and native boot. I never got a satisfying result. Windows on hardware with specific software, like Edge, was the only environment I could get smooth scrolling. There was a lot of "it seems smooth to me" which made it harder to figure out if it was the hardware, VM, OS, or application (there are a lot of Firefox advanced settings to make it "Mac-like"--which aren't).

As for mouse movement, like you're saying it's pretty good in a VM when it's HW -> macOS -> sending X and Y values to the VM and guest OS.

Windows on hardware, even using Apple's drivers, is a bit "off." I lose drags, moving around is odd, and I feel like I have to be more deliberate with clicking. I never seem to have those issues when using Windows inside a VM.

cassianoleal• 6 years ago

I haven't ran Linux on another machine in anger for a long time so I can't compare the between laptops.

I have run Linux on my old MBP 2015 though, and the trackpad is usable but as soon as you boot macOS again you realise how crap it was on Linux. Tweaking accels/speeds can bridge the gap a little but it's still not nearly as good.

harrygeez3• 6 years ago

Honestly, I don't think this is as difficult of a problem as we think. Has anybody tried scrolling in Windows UWP/Modern/RT apps with a precision touchpad? It's just as glorious. In fact, I've read many accounts of people who use pre-Chromium Edge just for the scrolling experience. Microsoft also ported this scrolling algorithm/profile to Chromium Edge, even if it's slightly less responsive (probably limited by win32)

If you don't like the scrolling in UWP it probably has more to do with it's acceleration graph than its capability. That, and macOS seem to just make their UI animations way smoother than anything I've seen on Windows and Linux. The Windows desktop switching and "expose" animation kills me every time it janks.

I don't know what's stopping Microsoft from porting this scrolling behavior to Win32, and to be fair it seem like they tried (scrolling in Explorer is noticeably different on a precision touchpad even though not as smooth) but probably they're held back by backward compatibility or that it's too much of an effort to make that pig fly.

azinman22• 6 years ago

I wouldn’t conflate someone else doing something you like with difficulty.

ghostpepper4• 6 years ago

My understanding about the smoothness of the animations in MacOS is that the animations interpolate along the gesture, versus being triggered only when the gesture is considered complete and thus registered.

Liskni_si• 6 years ago

there is a small but noticeably distance when I first start dragging a finger before the cursor moves

This might be https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/34... or https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/28.... The latter is easy to fix by commenting out hysteresis activation if you know your hardware doesn't need hysteresis. A proper fix would be to improve the wobble detection but neither me nor Peter apparently have time to work on that. :-/

asdff10• 6 years ago

I can speak for the mac trackpad on windows via bootcamp, and the experience is noticeably worse. Even scrolling feels like I stepped into a time machine to 15 years ago.

junker37• 6 years ago

Am I the only one who prefers the red nubs on on Thinkpads? I find it very hard to use any touchpads. When I used a mac, I would carry around a mouse. I wish thinkpads would get rid of the touchpad. I'm perfectly happy with just using the nub.

basch• 6 years ago

I'm also in trackpoint camp.

One think I dont like about them though, is that I have to make the choice whether the middle button is native windows scroll, or thinkpad scroll. The native scroll allows me to middle click links, tabs, windows, but has a delay that makes it almost unusable for scroll. The thinkpad scroll is beautiful, but now the button doesnt function as middle click.

If I choose to use native windows scroll, I end up using 2 finger scroll on the touchpad to counter the trackpoints inability to scroll correctly.

macintux• 6 years ago

That’s my idea of hell on earth. Gestures are so frictionless compared to a mouse or nub; 3-finger drag, tap to click, inertial scrolling...

fooker• 6 years ago

I would have used that if you could click by tapping on it.

JuettnerDistrib• 6 years ago

Are there any laptops with two nubs: one for the mouse, one for scrolling? Then one could also put the keyboard in a more comfortable position right where the touchpad is now.

lozf• 6 years ago

With the Thinkpads there's just the one nub, but the middle mouse button is easily reachable for scrolling.

proto-n• 6 years ago

Not sure if this is a universal feature but on my Thinkpad + Linux Mint setup holding the middle mouse button switches the nub from mouse to scrolling

fartcannon• 6 years ago

The comments on this post make me think of that scene in American Psycho with the business cards.

q92z8oeif2• 6 years ago

with my work enforced MBP most of the time i want to right click i end up clicking and triggering an unintended consequence just because i have my two fingers too close. On linux i never had this happen even on the cheapest touchpads.

nerdjon2• 6 years ago

That surprises me, I just tried very hard to smash my fingers together to make it think I was using one finger (I was using the Magic Trackpad, but I also tried on my 16" MBP) and it always registered a right click.

I actually can't think of the last time I misclicked a right click on Mac.

q92z8oeif2• 6 years ago

2015 15" if that makes any difference, but last models (2012 i think) had the same problem.

Maybe they optimize to the wrong finger size to the point you can't even if you try, and i trigger the bug too often.

slipheen• 6 years ago

Since the site is slow, here's a direct link to the Github page to Sponsor the project.

They want to hire a developer to fix the issues identified by the survey.

https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

mschuster91• 6 years ago

There are three things at play here that give Apple/OS X their unique advantage:

1) Size. I have huge hands. A 2015 MBP has a trackpad whose size I have yet to see on any Windows/Linux laptop. I'm too clumsy for IBM's trackpad and the tiny "touchpads" on usual laptops should rather be called "touchpadlets" because they are so small that most I have experienced have had my fingers awkwardly collide. I won't go back on non-Apple hardware until there is a decently wide offering of decently sized touchpads.

2) Drivers. Back with my last Windows laptop it was some Elantech touchpad with Elantech drivers. Installing some random drivers from some random other laptop on a forum hint somewhere in the 30th Google result area suddenly gave me a whole lot of gestures. Just... WTF? Why is this not a core OS component in Windows and has it been possible over the last five years (since I switched) to finally use gestures OOTB in Linux?!

3) OS primitives / integration. Windows and (IIRC, please correct me!) Linux operate on the concept of "steps" with absolute scroll delta values, while OS X (and iOS/Android) operates on ... I don't even know what, it simply feels utterly smooth instead of janky. But I also assume that this is the most difficult to fix :(

wbharding2• 6 years ago

Ugh: my web host is weak. If the page won't load for you, you can see its native version at https://public.amplenote.com/LiTtaTWY3GfzzhF26Exu8tXx

seltzered_3• 6 years ago

Just wanted to apologize for prematurely sharing this last week. Was testing the waters of linux again and happened to get curious about it.

_prototype_• 6 years ago

Given how much developer-contempt there is for the new touchpads, its amazing to me that the opposite of this has not been tried by hardware hackers already (as far as I know).

That is, hacking in an old tactile (non-touchpad) keyboard into the top section of the latest Macbook Pros.

Keyframe• 6 years ago

Hardware-wise, I'm extremely satisfied with Blade Stealth late 2019 one. However, (on popOS) there's a slight issue with palm rejection. I occasionally activate it with my palm. Is there a way to make rejection more aggressive?

throwaway555542• 6 years ago

On a related note, what are some decent external touch pads? I would love to have one to give my mouse hand a break sometimes while at my desktop.

nerdjon2• 6 years ago

Personally I use the Apple Magic Trackpad. It's just a giant slab on my desk and it's great (Don't even use a mouse). But I use that with a Mac, so it depends on what you are using.

throwaway555542• 6 years ago

I have a Mac, but I also have a Linux machine. I go back and forth depending.

floatboth2• 6 years ago

With https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/1117 scrolling in GTK apps (including Firefox) is really smooth

josteink• 6 years ago

Is this something one needs to enable?

And from what version of Gnome/GTK is this available?

floatboth2• 6 years ago

It's a patch that's not merged yet.

therealmarv• 6 years ago

Can we also talk about pinch and zoom (e.g. image viewer or browser)? It seems that gesture is totally artificial for desktop Linux (we have it on Android though) and there are not even API interfaces existing for that trackpad gesture.

Hoping all Linux input libraries will get a lot more attention and funding in the future :)

tw04• 6 years ago

For whatever it's worth/if it helps with this journey - the trackpad on the surface book/surface laptops is the closest I've seen to the mac trackpads. I'm assuming it's some combination of hardware and software. From stricly a tracking/responsiveness perspective, I would say they're dead even. I like the multi-finger click options better on MacOS - I'm sure it would be trivial for Microsoft to implement if they wanted to.

guenthert• 6 years ago

This is a solved problem, isn't it? On my Dell M6800 with Ubuntu 16.04, the touchpad experience is very poor, I avoid using it. On my (Linux based after all) Chromebook Pixel (anno 2013) it's fine, never been tempted to connect a mouse.

Perhaps I should clarify: the difference is also a difference in usage: on the Chromebook I use the trackpad almost exclusively to select the current window or scroll its content, rarely set the cursor or highlight some text to be copied (the latter is already more challenging than with a mouse, I'd say). I haven't attempted to use a CAD program using the touch pad yet. So the touchpad works mostly fine for what a Chromebook is useful for, it's no replacement for a mouse on a workstation.

brandon_edens• 6 years ago

Part of the Apple touch story is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks

Mikeb854• 6 years ago

I'm just curious what exactly the deficiency is on touchpads with Linux? I have a fairly commodity Acer laptop (Swift 3 w/ Ryzen APU), and the touchpad is accurate, sensitive (no noticeable lag at all), two finger scrolling works, tap to click works with one, two and three fingers, etc... I haven't changed any settings except sensitivity and whatnot in the standard Ubuntu settings GUI.

jamil74• 6 years ago

Whatever you think of Apple, for some reason there is a huge gap in their trackpads and basically everything else I've tried. There is the way the physical trackpad feels and doesn't "stick" as well as the responsiveness and accuracy of the drivers.

Mikeb854• 6 years ago

That's not a real answer though. What objective difference is there? From some replies it might be software in the OS that changes the acceleration of the cursor, so that'd be an answer if true.

Personally, I hate the feel of MacOS. The cursor seems unnaturally slow and when you crank up the speed has some weird behaviour.

jamil74• 6 years ago

A few years ago I was dual booting Arch on a 2013 Macbook Pro and couldn't for the life of me get the trackpad working nicely as it would on MacOS. Up until then I'd made the assumption that Apple trackpads felt the way they did mostly due to hardware. When writing code I'm using vim and am keyboard focused but I've become really used to browsing websites and docs using the trackpad on MacOS.

Edit: some formatting

bodhibyte• 6 years ago

A few comments here have mentioned that MacBook touchpad development is tied to iPhone touchscreen R&D. This might be stating the obvious, but could a similar effort be made by leveraging Android touchscreen R&D and code for Linux? [1]

[1] https://source.android.com/devices/input/touch-devices

nemoniac• 6 years ago

I disable my Touchpad, not because of any shortcomings it might have, but because one of the selling points of a ThinkPad for me is the Trackpoint. I can operate it fine without moving my hands from the home typing position with my thumb's on the mouse buttons.

_emacsomancer_• 6 years ago

I just physically unplug the touchpad and fingerprint reader on mine.

jeffomatic• 6 years ago

I recently tried switching from an MBP to an X1 Carbon, in a yet another attempt to switch to Linux as my daily driver. I ended up being thwarted, to my surprise, by the touchpad support.

The big problem I encountered was poor palm detection: I learned through this process that I have a tendency to use the touchpad with my right hand, while my left hand is still in typing position. This means that the edge of my left palm rests along the upper-left corner of the touchpad. This would result in the driver sometimes detecting two touchpoints instead of one, and I would end up scrolling when I meant to move the pointer.

The result of this was pretty amazing to me: after a few hours of use I found that my wrists, shoulders, and neck hurt because I was subconsciously trying to adjust my hands to avoid this. After a couple of days trying different drivers and tweaking config files, I ended up conceding that it just wasn't there yet.

It's too bad: I have lots of imposter syndrome about understanding my OS and using Linux seems like a great cure. But after literally decades of trying, what I've noticed is that hardware (or at least, my acclimating to new hardware) always advances enough past Linux's capabilities that the switch is difficult. In the past, it was about getting sound cards or WiFi working, and nowadays it's about things like touchpads and high-resolution displays.

lliamander2• 6 years ago

I find that, with my Thinkpads that I don't use the touchpad at all. I find the trackpoint a much more convenient pointing device as it keeps my hands a home row.

jordanbeiber• 6 years ago

And they never run out of space!

jakear• 6 years ago

Touchpad scrolling is nice. Yes keyboard shortcuts exist for scroll, but I for whatever reason vastly prefer touch-based.

Ballas2• 6 years ago

Trackpoints are amazing! I just wish they were more popular. I have had to resort to building custom keyboards with trackpoints to overcome the limited availability.

Enginerrrd• 6 years ago

This is actually usually pretty configurable. You have to use the actual config file though and not the GUI to get the really tunable numeric settings of palm-size and whatnot.

Also, understand that there's libinput or touchpad synaptics and you can use the other one if one isn't working for you. I have had better luck with libinput myself but it probably depends on the hardware.

mchristen• 6 years ago

That is such a horrible user experience though, it's no different than having to hack apart your X11 config file to get the proper modeline support for your monitor, or to map your keyboard so your Super key works.

Thankfully we've moved past those problems for now, until you want to use multiple screens or use a touchpad.

Desktop Linux still has a long way to go if there is ever going to be any appreciable market share.

GordonS7• 6 years ago

Hmm, I don't recall ever having a problem with palms on any touchpad, ever. On desktop I do usually use Windows or MacOS (mostly terminal on Linux), but I do occasionally use Linux (Ubuntu) on an aging HP Zbook, and never had an issue. I used to use Ubuntu desktop a lot quite a few years back, and don't recall any issues even then.

freedomben2• 6 years ago

This is so surprising to me. I use Fedora on Thinkpad T580 (Fedora keeps the kernel very fresh (and has best/latest hardware fixes in it)) but I can't get the palm detection to fail for me even if I try. It just works with the out-of-the-box settings for me.

new_realist• 6 years ago

Linux will always lag, never lead, at problems where there are no paid developers, like the non-ChromeOS, non-Android user experience.

darekkay• 6 years ago

I've switched to a MBP 2015 as my work laptop about 1 year ago, and it's the only device I have palm issues with. I've never, ever had any issues with other laptops (my previous work laptop was a T460). I guess the bigger-than-usual touchpad size on the MBP is the main issue.

wbharding2• 6 years ago

If anyone is curious to see what people think about Linux touchpads currently, here are some of the preliminary results with 9000 responses counted thus far:

https://public.amplenote.com/HbcoZf/touchpad-results-prelim

Average satisfaction looks to be around 2 of 5. People are excited about multi-touch, especially the double finger right click.

yewenjie• 6 years ago

Am I just the minority who finds touchpad on my GNU/Linux system reasonably functional and bug-free?

With a tool like Fusumu (https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma) I am using three finger and four finger gestures just fine!

ghostpepper4• 6 years ago

The experience is not terrible, it's just that when compared side by side it's clearly inferior.

lonelappde2• 6 years ago

No way this is just a matter of paying a freelancer $50K. If that was it then System76 would have done it and someone would be rich from selling a closed source driver already.

And software doesn't even touch the problem that most of what's wrong with non-Mac touchpads is the universally lousy hardware.

WesolyKubeczek3• 6 years ago

I have this to ask about this project:

1) how exactly are you planning to cooperate with upstream (meaning Peter Hutterer, meaning Red Hat)? Suppose someone does the work, then what? libinput has issues open for years, including issues that have patches, how are you going to make sure yours is not going to get buried?

2) if there existed a programmer both capable and willing to pull this off, wouldn’t it make sense for them to set up sponsorship themselves and cut the middleman out?

WesolyKubeczek3• 6 years ago

Some research done on the subject: https://pavelfatin.com/scrolling-with-pleasure/

Linux touchpad like a MacBook Pro, May 2020 update

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