
Linux touchpad: preliminary project funding, survey results - wbharding
https://bill.harding.blog/2020/05/17/linux-touchpad-preliminary-project-funding-survey-results/
======
eth0up
Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux,
is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced
madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My
present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness"
sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the
wiki for Unethical Human Experimentation. Of course, Linux is not entirely to
blame; the physical quality has declined immensely for most touch/clickpads.

Perhaps someday I'll experience playing go without a mouse and risk of
hypertension.

I'm typically not one to use the term - but godspeed, in this case!

~~~
the8472
> My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers.

Under which circumstances is disabling it on a software level insufficient?

~~~
eth0up
An emotional one.

~~~
the_af
I like your honest answer.

I can't stand laptop touchpads on any OS (except Apple trackpads, which I
admit are usable, but I don't own a macbook so this point is moot). I can't
stand most laptop _keyboards_ either. I use an external keyboard and mouse in
every laptop, making them effectively "portable computers".

------
viseztrance
I can hardly tell the difference between my razer stealth linux touchpad and
my workprovided macbook.

Even based on the feedback, it seems that most people are okay with their
touchpad experience and are more interested in advanced features like
multitouch.

Having this said, for myself this is a tough sell. I'm concerned that I would
donate and I won't be able to tell the difference between this and some
placebo drivers.

~~~
WalterGR
_I can hardly tell the difference between my razer stealth linux touchpad and
my workprovided macbook._

How much of the surface of the Linux touchpad is clickable? I.e. how much of
it depresses when you press on it, vs. the MacBook?

I’ve never seen a non-Apple touchpad that didn’t have a big dead zone in the
back (closest to the display) 1/4 to 1/3 of the surface.

~~~
ubercow13
That's a physical limitation because the touchpad hinges from the back. No new
touchpad driver is going to fix that.

~~~
duskwuff
And the Apple touchpad doesn't hinge at all! The "click" reaction you get when
you press it is simulated by a set of force sensors and an actuator that
vibrates the trackpad to simulate a click.

~~~
dsego
Apple trackpads used to hinge 10 years ago.

~~~
saagarjha
Actually, they used to sell a trackpad that did that until last year!

~~~
chacha2
iPad pro still does.

~~~
shadowfacts
The trackpad on the Magic Keyboard doesn't have a hinge at the back, there's a
single button under the center and a lever that runs under the sides which
actuates the button and makes the physical click movement:
[https://www.ifixit.com/News/41291/dang-the-ipad-pro-magic-
ke...](https://www.ifixit.com/News/41291/dang-the-ipad-pro-magic-keyboard-
looks-cool-in-x-rays)

------
myself248
This is still the most frustrating thing about Linux for me. I have two
Thinkpads, a T460 running Windows from my employer, and a T560 running Ubuntu
as my personal. Their touchpad hardware is, of course, identical. The
experiences couldn't be more different.

When I first got the machine, I spent weeks fighting with the driver, trying
to figure out how a single number can represent four lines on two dimensions
to define a region where palm-touch should be ignored. I still haven't gotten
pointer precision where I'd like it; I simply know that getting within ten
pixels is the best I can hope for without infuriatingly slow rocking and
coaxing my finger around. It's disappointing to say the least.

Honestly what I'd like most, is a WINE-like shim to simply let me run the
Windows driver in some sort of sandbox and take its mouse-events to the Linux
input system. Synaptics has clearly done the work to make the thing behave the
way I'd like, and it would be the coolest thing if identical settings were
equivalent and portable between machines.

~~~
segfaultbuserr
Am I the only one who finds the Synaptics trackpads on many laptops are simply
a nightmare in itself regardless of the operating system due to the physical
design? Not all Synaptics trackpads are created equal, on some machines, the
surface friction just doesn't feel correct, making the pointer acceleration
difficult to control. _I know I was probably using it wrong and I should 've
spent an hour tweaking the parameters in the Synaptics Windows Driver, but I
don't really know what's the best for me._ Even worse, some Synaptics
trackpads have cheap plastic that worn out after a year or so, creating an
uneven friction, making the navigation a difficult experience. I know I could
replace it, but making the touchpad as a consumable item is not a good design.
Also, on many ultralight machines, the available space is simply too small to
have an adequate space for plamrest.

Finally, as a matter of personal preference, I found clicking the button on
the touchpad is never a good experience - the pad is clickable, but only on
its edge, or you could touch-click, but you need to constantly lifting your
finger. The touch gestures are confusing as well, to this day I never figured
out any of the gesture I could use. The device driver really should come with
an animated tutorial. The only feature I found was scrolling at the edge or
double-finger scrolling, but it's only useful if you want to scroll a few
lines, rolling the entire page is a tiresome experience (unlike the middle-
button scrolling on a TrackPoint).

As a result, I only use the TrackPoint on Thinkpad laptops. Although the
TrackPoint is not completely free from the pointer acceleration issue in
general on Linux (although I never found it to be an issue for me), the
overall usability is much better because it doesn't have the physical design
issues.

~~~
emmelaich
The trackpad on Macs is one of the major reasons I stick with Mac laptops.

~~~
spacephysics
Same, despite the overheating issue with my model, and the copious amount of
OS issues with the more recent releases, I’ve yet to find a laptop that comes
close to Apple’s track pad.

To a point where sometimes I prefer the track pad over a mouse.

~~~
neal_jones
You’ve probably already heard about this, but there has been a large
discussion about how charging from the traditional left side of 15” (and I
believe 16”) MBPs results in heat and fan issues. A lot of people have had
improved results just by switching power to the right.

~~~
api
That is just ridiculous.

~~~
teruakohatu
Not more than the previous keyboards which can't handle a spec of dust under
the keys.

------
phoe-krk
> _There 's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have
> supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll
> respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause._

~~~
BiteCode_dev
I answered the poll, and said I would pay $50 for this, but never received any
follow up (and I think I provided my email, I usually do in polls if they give
the option).

Now I just realized that there is a github sponsor link, but it's recurring. I
don't want recurring. I want to send $50 once.

~~~
forbiddenlake
You can sign up, pay once, then cancel.

~~~
grawprog
Why should the onus be on me to make sure I don't pay more money than I want?
I can't stand this 'just subscribe then cancel' mentality. I would like the
option for a one time payment for things without having to fuck around
starting and cancelling subscriptions. It's just ridiculous.

~~~
m463
> Why should the onus be on me to make sure I don't pay more money than I
> want?

follow the money. :)

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ghostpepper
Off topic but did anyone else notice that this entire blog post is actually
hosted on a site called amplenote? With uMatrix enabled, the wordpress blog
just shows an empty post with a broken iframe. Is this a common architecture?
What's the purpose?

~~~
bArray
On my system the iframe is really small but the content is in there. I've seen
a bunch of sites doing this recently and it's quite annoying.

~~~
ghostpepper
Just to be clear my settings deliberately block iframes by default until I
allow them. I just thought it was odd that the whole Wordpress blog is
literally window dressing.

------
kevincox
I've used a mac occasionally and there are really only two features I miss
from the trackpad level: \- Add a finger to click. This is very useful to be
able to click without stopping dragging your finger. \- The acceleration curve
for pointing feels more natural. This was surprising to me because I use Linux
primarily but I feel like I hit targets slightly more on MacOS.

With libinput I have found that multi-touch gestures work really well we are
just missing application support. It seems that this project doesn't aim to
work on applications at all so for me it seems like they are barking up the
wrong tree. For example I would love to have Firefox wired up to linux three-
finger swipe gestures for forward/back (and I bind down -> Scroll To Top and
up -> Close tab).

------
noobermin
I guess it helps not to get used to "better experiences" just judging by the
comments here. I bought a laptop and and have dual boot but use linux
primarily. Every time I'd have to use Windows, it would be a serious
frustrating pain in the ass. A lot of these things I am 999% convinced are
just based on familiarity than actual ergonomics.

~~~
kochthesecond
Well, the Mac trackpad is an absolute joy to use..

The quality of trackpads outside of Macs used to annoy me to no end, but my
2018 zenbook with libinput isn't that bad. It's like 80% of the way there for
a quarter of the price.

------
dmix
Looks like the number of contributors have doubled since this post hit the
frontpage.

That's great, this is one of the few things left that held back Linux desktop,
and it wasn't even that bad with some tweaking but it shouldn't need tweaking.
Gnome has made drastic improvements in recent years as well.

Now if only companies would fund proper open source graphics drivers then
there would be no reason for developers to not use Linux. Otherwise you need
to buy a laptop with Linux in mind and you'll be fine.

~~~
peatmoss
Re GPU: Running a desktop with a shiny new AMD 5700-xt, and it has been pretty
excellent. Only nit to pick is that I had to add a small bit of configuration
to enable FreeSync support with my monitor.

Performance in various Steam games (native as well as emulated via Proton) has
not been a disappointment.

That said, previously had an NVidia card that worked okay with Ubuntu, but
required enabling some proprietary drivers. It worked fine, but was an extra
hoop to jump, and using proprietary drivers sticks in my craw.

If I did anything on my desktop that relied on CUDA, I suspect I’d be stuck
with using the proprietary NVidia drivers.

------
gertrunde
I'm faintly curious, how does the MacOS "Touchpad Experience" referenced in
question #1 differ from the Windows one? (Or any other OS?)

(Background to my ignorance: While I do (very) occasionaly use MacOS, I
usually default to the terminal as it's more familiar... and probably spend
most (60-70%) of my time connected to linux or unix-like systems via
cli/ssh... from a Windows system.)

Are we talking touch gestures or something? Or multi-finger things? Are they
really that massively different? Surely a touchpad is a touchpad? (Not
counting those awful things without proper buttons).

~~~
sethhochberg
You'd think "surely a touchpad is a touchpad", but the reality for most heavy
users is that Apple really does have an experience substantially better than
most in this area.

Large tracking surface. No dead zones, which can't be touched or tapped.
Fantastic palm rejection. Gestures that work reliably, and never over or
under-detect fingers.

Its not really to say that the Apple trackpads are better at their best than
the other vendors, as much as it is that the other vendors often behave in
unpredictable ways. I used to have a Thinkpad which worked every bit as well
as my current Macbook trackpad when it worked right, but which would
frequently fail to recognize a finger during a scrolling gesture, couldn't be
clicked on the portion closest to the keyboard, and occasionally the palm
rejection just wouldn't work. The minor annoyances over time add up to a much
more frustrating experience.

~~~
aarmenaa
I've noticed that two-finger scrolling, which should be one of the easiest
things to get right, is wrong on basically anything that's not MacOS. Windows
and Linux arbitrarily insist on 3-line scrolling in a lot of apps. Even when
pixel scrolling is technically available, it works poorly. It appears small
movements are ignored, and then once you've hit some sort of distance
threshold the scroll "jumps" to register the whole movement. There's weird
delays where you need to "un-touch" the pad before you can transition from
moving the cursor to scrolling. The scroll gets "dropped" after a while even
though I still have two fingers on the pad.

I've seen all this across many laptops running Linux and Windows, including
Macs, which leads me to believe that that the issue software.

~~~
wbkang
Actually on Windows, 3 line scrolling is a configurable default in the control
panel. On X/Linux, on the other hand, is where it's hard-coded to 1 line and
there is no way to change it to 3 without having undesired side effects (such
as scroll events being fired 3 times).

~~~
myself248
But no matter what you set it to, an inch of scroll motion on the trackpad
results in a different number of screen-inches of window movement, between
different apps.

In Ubuntu right now: Firefox seems pretty intuitive, one trackpad-height worth
of finger movement results in roughly one screen-height worth of window
movement. That's great.

But LibreOffice Calc, for the same amount of finger movement in the upward
direction, scrolls about 3 screenfulls up. And bizarrely, for the same amount
of finger movement in the downward direction, scrolls about half a screen.

Discord desktop app (which I assume is Electron like everything else), scrolls
about 1.5 screens per touchpad-worth of finger movement. That's acceptably
close to Firefox and not disorienting.

Gedit scrolls about 2 screens per touchpad.

Arduino IDE scrolls about 2 screens per touchpad.

How on earth can these be different? And how do you even start to fix that?

~~~
floriol
They all use different UI toolkits, some are gtk, some are java UIs, some are
electron-based apps. So that's why - it's a higher level problem that is
unfortunately inherent to desktop fragmentation which is hard to avoid on
linux.

------
pmontra
I've been using Ubuntu since 2009, two HP laptops and zero problems with the
touchpad. I used the first one with Windows for two years and the touchpad
behaved better with Ubuntu than with Windows. I think the improvement was two
finger scrolling instead of sliding on the right edge. I used only Ubuntu on
the second laptop so I can't do any comparison but I never felt anything wrong
with the touchpad. HP nc8430 and ZBook 15 first gen.

------
tadfisher
After using a Steam Controller for a couple of years, I would love to use its
trackball-emulation feature with my laptop touchpad. Would anyone else like to
see this feature experimented with?

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rcthompson
I'm a little unclear on how close to the funding goal this is. As far as I can
tell, the goal is $10k total, but the current funding level shown is per
month. Does it just mean that work can't begin until the accrued balance
reaches $10k?

Also, is there a way to make a one-time donation rather than an ongoing
monthly pledge?

------
bubblethink
I just hope that libinput matches the xorg synaptics driver before it is
deprecated. On every major OS release, I try the live cd to check if the
touchpad with libinput is on par with synaptics, but it isn't there yet.

~~~
floatboth
libinput has been far ahead of xorg synaptics since forever.

------
sandov
As a touchpad-ignorant person (I have not used Macbook touchpad, so I don't
know what I'm missing) Linux touchpad support had always seemed fine to me
until distros started using libinput by default.

Last time I tried libinput, I couldn't disable acceleration on touchpads.
"Flat" acceleration profile still had acceleration.

~~~
bschwindHN
If you're happy with the current state on linux...don't ever use a macbook
trackpad. It'll ruin you.

------
cmeacham98
Interestingly, I seem to have had the opposite experience of many people in
this thread. On windows, the touchpad driver uses this annoying tray
application, defaults to "tap = click" (does anybody seriously like this
behavior on trackpads with physical buttons?), and also includes some easy to
trigger gestures I often hit causing my windows to do something stupid. On
linux the drivers have always "just worked", felt like similar mouse
movement/scrolling to windows, and didn't come with tap to click or gestures I
never used.

------
bchociej
Color me stunned that people are so dissatisfied with their touchpads in
Linux. 0-3 lines of options in my config have made me perfectly content with
every touchpad I've ever used in Linux.

~~~
rurban
Care to share? Would be really appreciated

~~~
bchociej
I am away from my laptop for the time being, unfortunately. But it's generally
a bit of pointer acceleration and enabling two finger scrolling, if I have to
configure anything at all.

------
odiroot
My god. I hope Ubuntu is not going to jump on this quickly. My current setup
with Synaptics and just two manual tweaks is perfect for me.

The way MacBook touchpads work always irked me, always felt off. But maybe
it's necessary for MacBooks with their enormous tachpad surfaces.

------
seltzered_
The donation link seems fairly buried under the comments, but here it is
again:
[https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear](https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear)

------
_ZeD_
So am I the only one that really _hate_ multitouch.

The really thing I want is * left click on the left side of the touchpad *
right click on the right side of the touchpad * right and bottom area to
scroll (with ONE DAMN FINGER)

~~~
seph-reed
Of course not. But as much as you hate it, I love it, and it turns out most of
the work needed to have things our own way is shared.

As a person who just wants the MacOs experience, I'll gladly support the fact
that you should be able to make it work the way you want too.

------
wbharding
This project is now up to 75 supporters and $800 monthly sponsor estimate,
which should be a good enough starting point to start talking to devs. Thanks
a bunch, HN!

------
ZeroCool2u
As one of the people that said I'd donate to this cause and setup my first
GitHub sponsorship for this project, I'm very excited!

------
blendergeek
Honestly, I hate the Apple touchpad experience. I love Linux touchpad
experience, except for when there are multiple drivers available and depending
on which one is being used, my settings change.

Oh, and, 'tap to click' should be default.

~~~
ThePowerOfFuet
>I hate the Apple touchpad experience

You're definitely in the minority on that.

> Oh, and, 'tap to click' should be default.

Okay, now you're just trolling.

~~~
blendergeek
I really do like tap-to-click. I may be in the minority. After checking the
numbers again, I'm definitely in the minority on HN. But, no, I'm not
trolling. Tap-to-click is sooooooo nice. I can use all touch pads the same
whether or not they can be clicked all over. I don't have to click (which
makes a sound). I know that sound may not annoy everybody, but i was once
recording audio, and every file started with a 'click' sound ... until i
enabled tap-to-click. And i have never looked back.

The one thing i love about Apple touch pads is 'natural scrolling'. What a
beauty.

------
squid_demon
Will Linux fix their mouse support as part of this project?

~~~
nitrogen
Came here to say the same thing. Every Linux distro release the mouse finds a
new way to break -- different acceleration profile, impossibly slow followed
by impossibly fast, etc. -- and I have to update my _fix_mouse.sh_ autorun
script to scan for whatever the new _xinput_ parameter names are.

It's unfortunately distressingly common in software, but especially Linux
GUIs, to fix one thing by breaking three others instead of identifying a
better framework to fix the root cause. The Linux kernel does seem to be good
at that last part, but not the desktop projects.

~~~
techntoke
Never had an issue before. What distro and window manager are you using? I'm
running Arch with Sway and no issues whatsoever with the mouse.

~~~
nitrogen
Kububtu with a Logitech G500s set to ~2000dpi and a 250Hz or 500Hz report
rate. I had similar issues with other DEs and login managers in the past.

I keep meaning to try KDE Neon or switch back to Mint or something, but I have
very little desire to mess with my OS these days.

------
yencabulator
Q3 bars go 2 1 3 4 5.

------
fortran77
No multitouch!?

~~~
boudin
Yeah, didn't get that. Multitouch is definitely there. Not all gestures
though.

~~~
skykooler
It very much depends on what hardware you have currently.

