I'm running Asahi Linux on my macbook, and the trackpad feels amazing there! Especially pixel perfect scrolling and gestures in mutter.<p>I only have two minor issues:<p>There doesn't seem to be a working stop scroll event when using kinetic scrolling in Firefox. On osx you can stop kinetic scrolling by just touching the trackpad, but on linux you have to scroll a little bit to slow it down.<p>And generally the kinetic scrolling isn't yet consistent across applications. Firefox has a nice implementation, but it feels quite different from Gnome apps, and then some like gnome-terminal don't have working kinetic scrolling yet.
I did a lot of research and Fedora on my Lenovo T480s with glass touchpad feels a lot like macOS now, with some minor details... thanks for the huge effort. Here are my experiences:<p># Precision<p>The precision on short movements is not as good. On macOS I can move from "minimize" to "close" without a hazzle, on Fedora it is slightly off. I don't know if macOS handles short movements differently, but it feels still more natural.<p># Kinetic scrolling<p>I don't know where kinetic scrolling is (and should be) implemented exactly (libinput, mutter or in every app), but on macOS it seems like it just works everywhere while on Fedora some apps don't support kinetic scrolling att all and where it is supported (e.g. Firefox) the scroll speed was WAY to fast (maybe because of WQHD). There was no way to fix this with on board / gnome settings, I had to use a special hook daemon for this (<a href="https://gitlab.com/warningnonpotablewater/libinput-config.git" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/warningnonpotablewater/libinput-config.gi...</a>).<p># Gestures<p>Gestures do work, but at some places there are fiddly to use or just don't work because of in app overrides (e.g. if you use remmina and are logged in to another system, the gestures are not working as expected). On macOS everything works seamlessly, even in Microsoft RDP app or VNC connections.<p>That's my feedback for now, but I'm a happy Fedora user - there is no way back to macOS ;)
This project (along with many Gnome improvements over the past 2 years) was pivotal in making me switch from a MacBook to a more ergonomic travel setup (<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm/how_long_have_you_been_using_an_ergo_mobile/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm...</a> )<p>Thanks again!
In related news, libinput is almost ready to merge customizable pointer acceleration curves: <a href="https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/350" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/35...</a>
Since 2018, Linux Touchpad landscape has changed drastically. I remember how bad the situation was before 2018, no gestures, no accurate precision, pretty inferior.<p>After Touchegg came, everything kinda changed. Gnome and KDE introduced native gestures and it has boosted the adoption of Linux on laptops.<p>I hope we also get zoom capabilities in Chromium and Firefox and smooth scroll capabilities. Other than that, I do not miss anything from Windows or MacOS, it's all great!<p>PS: I have Touchegg config files readily available for better gestures on Linux:<p><a href="https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ZorinGestures">https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ZorinGestures</a><p><a href="https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE">https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE</a>
As a linux user in 2022, I think the touchpad is as good as the Mac one. It's different for sure, but my Thinkpad has an excellent touchpad with great buttons. I don't even agree with the premise that there's a problem in the software.
I have a Samsung Galaxy book with Manjaro and wayland. The touchpad works. Multi touch, gestures, and everything. But it isn't great. I blame the hardware for this. It's a generic cheap synaptic thing in a cheap laptop. So, my expectations were kind of low for this.<p>On the software front, there is basically no way to configure this thing in a sane way either. At least not in Gnome. So, the software has lots of room to be fixed. Some kind of simple UI to dial in responsiveness and configure things like gestures would be nice. But you can't make mediocre hardware great with just software. I also had some issues with Firefox until I figured out that I needed to fiddle with some settings to make it not scroll super fast. After that it was usable. But I bought a wireless mouse because it is just not a great experience using it for extended periods of time.<p>I actually connected my Apple magic keyboard and trackpad 2 at some point and that worked great. Still no way to configure the trackpad properly but it got recognized and it felt as responsive and usable as I'm used to on a mac. It's great on Linux as well. If Asahi keeps on improving, I might install it on a mac. I use the M1 macbook pro for work and it's a great piece of hardware. None of the PC vendors come even close to how good that is.
What I'd like is to have some sort of exportable hardware training and configuration. I use a few different laptops (and desktops), and I want the touchpad to feel the same between each of them.
I have a Framework laptop and I think on Fedora the touchpad is no worse than on my MBP. The only annoyance is that AFAICT there's no way to change the speed of 2 finger scrolling, and it's a bit faster than I'd prefer (maybe that's a Gnome problem?)
If like me you have struggled with your big hands's palms getting the cursor to
jump around for no reason, what worked for me me was programmatically reducing
the area of the touchpad like this :<p><a href="http://tuxdiary.com/2014/12/16/reduce-effective-area-touchpad-linux/" rel="nofollow">http://tuxdiary.com/2014/12/16/reduce-effective-area-touchpa...</a><p>Another thing you may not be aware is some touchpads have a scroll function that
works with only one finger on the right edge of the touchpad and it is not
always marked clearly so on the touchpad. I know that made the problem even
worse. I don't quite remember the setting to deactivate though.
So 2023 will be the perennial Year of the Linux Touchpad?<p>I don't know the details of this but it seems like we're touching on some fundamental architectural problems with Linux here. Please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like a combination of:<p>1. The Linux device driver model is fundamentally flawed. Namly, device drivers live in the kernel (I'm including modules here) and there's no stable ABI to isolate device drivers;<p>2. This seems to be another example where X is showing its age and the fact that it was designed to do things people care less about.<p>A lot of engineers like to use Macs for development because its Unix-like and has a nice and responsive UI and hardware. There are technical problems with OSX but they don't seem to matter.<p>High DPI didsplay were a problem for Linux for the longest time where it quickly became just a scaling setting in OSX. OSX seems to benefit for complete vertical integration in a big way here.<p>To be fair, touchpads are (IMHO) a big problem on Windows too. This just seems to be an area that Apple completely nails (hardware and software). It's kind of weird that a decade+ later Windows and Linux are still playing catch up, even with Mac hardware.
So, for all of this posturing and dono collection for 2+ years, afaict most of what all of this has resulted in is:<p>- <a href="https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/merge_requests/401" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/merge_requests/401</a><p>- <a href="https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=474414919c102f2973d2ed9815f997fdb1f30d9c" rel="nofollow">https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=474...</a><p>and as far as I can tell the rest is "already done for Wayland upstream" or "still not done yet" trending towards "likely to not be done as more and more folks realize why Wayland is the replacement of X11".<p>Every time, I arrive at this conclusion and feel like a jerk, but even just comparing this update with the Dec 2021 update, I feel like I'm not far off.
And here I am sitting with a HP ZBook and the touchpad doesn't even work. At all. I tried everything I could find on Google. No luck.<p>(It only works if I disable nvidia drivers, but that's not really useful.)
Note that this narrow definition of Linux leaves out the leading touchpad implementation: ChromeOS. If you wanted mac-like touchpad performance and Linux, you could have had it for many years now.
One weird issue I have is that sometimes but not always, Firefox launches with touchpad support disabled. I think it mainly happens when Firefox gets launched as my default browser to handle clicking a link in another application. This happens despite me setting `MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1` globally and even verifying that it's set in `/proc/[PID]/environ`.
One thing about the Firefox gesture support is that it seems to be hardcoded gestures rather than using browser.gesture.swipe.* prefs like it does on macOS. I would love to map swipe-down to close tab and the back swipe to also close tabs if they are at the start of the history. However they seem to use some other non-configurable system.
Good to see they are still working on this. I supported the project for the first year, then moved on to support others. I've just re-sponsored on GitHub Sponsors. If someone is willing and able to do the dirty work all across the Linux stack, no to mention pull requests, mailing lists, etc, then the least I can do is give them $5!
Two questions:<p>Is this the reason that scrolling left and right in firefox now goes back and forth in history? Or is this something firefox on its own thought would be a great idea?<p>And why is sway listed in this? Isn't the whole point of using sway to do most, if not everything with the keyboard?
Wish Windows had an external touchpad with a similar quality to the Apple magic trackpad.<p>I really think I find myself better with trackpads than mouses for everything than copy pasting between editor/browser/chat/whatever.