I only have two minor issues:
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.
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.
The fix seems to unfortunately be gated by Firefox migrating to GTK4 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568722
# Precision
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.
# Kinetic scrolling
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 (https://gitlab.com/warningnonpotablewater/libinput-config.gi...).
# Gestures
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.
That's my feedback for now, but I'm a happy Fedora user - there is no way back to macOS ;)
Thanks again!
After Touchegg came, everything kinda changed. Gnome and KDE introduced native gestures and it has boosted the adoption of Linux on laptops.
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!
PS: I have Touchegg config files readily available for better gestures on Linux:
The touchpad feeling is slightly off, choppy I would say (it gets kind of "stuck") . I also tried to setup 3 and 4 finger gestures to switch desktops similar to OSX. There are two linux libraries that achieve that. One didn't work AT ALL and the other kind of works: it sends the signal, but for some reason it takes some time to change desktop. While doing the ctrl+alt+arrow works smoothly.
I use it OK but I am sad that's the state of the art I 2023.
If you have compatible hardware, try a Wayland-based system and see if that fixes the smoothness for you. It's completely possible to get 60fps 1:1 touchpad gestures on most laptops that have come out in the past decade.
Linux touchpads were quite bad, even being worse than the same hardware on Windows (thanks Synaptic!) - but I agree; I haven't had any issues with linux trackpads since 2018.
Granted though, I had an excellent linux laptop (Precision 5520) and it could also be because trackpad hardware is getting better too.
On a friends laptop, the touchpad was absolutely atrocious. Also a Synaptic touchpad, which worked just as well on Windows, but on Linux it seemingly had defaulted back to a virtual PS/2 touchpad without even two finger support, let alone normal multi touch.
This project is definitely helping applications and compatible hardware get better, but I think the biggest issue is still the lack of proper driver support from major manufacturers like Synaptic. Another issue is the fact that X11 and multi touch just don't mix, the protocol isn't good for it. I firmly believe the future is Wayland but I'm currently stuck with X and probably will be for a while because my problems are caused by Nvidia drivers combined with a laptop mux chip, two famously hard to solve problems as an end user.
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.
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.
Quite a few expected gestures just work, several more can be mapped for gesture-friendliness between Win11 and MacOS.
But the basics are off: clicking, dragging, scrolling, all are just a bit fiddly, with click needing a very deliberate click on upper half of touch pad while works better the lower you go. ... Learned from sibling comment here why that is.
I agree several of the speeds are off, and built in controls don't get me there. Haven't tried any third party tools, only Win11 + frame.work drivers.
The other thing I miss is the sheer real estate of the current M1 Pros.
TL;DR: The current frame.work laptop touchpad hardware is good enough to be usable by a MacOS user in Win11 (haven't tried yet in Linux).
http://tuxdiary.com/2014/12/16/reduce-effective-area-touchpa...
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.
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:
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;
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I two finger scroll on a mac, the content smoothly matches the movement of my finger. When I two finger scroll on linux it scrolls, but emulates a notched mouse wheel, with definite steps and no momentum. Some window management gestures worked on gnome, but as I noticed when trying to get four finger virtual desktop switching, you do the gesture then a command is run. On Mac the gesture animation starts as soon as your fingers start doing it, matching your speed and movement.
It's cool that I can map any gesture to whatever command I want, but it is very far from a smooth and responsive touchpad experience. My uneducated guess is that certain things in the linux UI stack only operate in mouse actions and have no mechanism for passing on multitouch gestures?
This is 95% of the problem, and frankly it's not even an insurmountable one; Touchegg was a solution that would buffer both touchpad gestures and the animations, giving you "smooth" but not 1:1 gestures on x11. It was... okay, but clearly a different model was required to make it work.
> 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.
I completely don't understand what you're talking about here. Linux can also do display scaling like MacOS, it's just horribly ugly and blurry on most systems. The current goal is switching to a more Windows-like model where the actual UI libraries can be scaled instead of pointlessly doubling pixels like they do on Mac: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/421858/how-does-di...
> It's kind of weird that a decade+ later Windows and Linux are still playing catch up
Really? Having used all three operating systems, I don't know what you're pointing to here. Linux is far-and-away my preferred Unix-like operating system now that it has gesture support, and even Windows is frankly not that bad in comparison to MacOS. Both OSes second-guess your authority and relentlessly push you ads, honestly I have no preference between MacOS and Windows anymore.
- https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/merge_requests/401
- https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=474...
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".
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.
(It only works if I disable nvidia drivers, but that's not really useful.)
The touchpad does work but it has a very annoying issue: accidental palm clicks.
I haven't been able to solve it yet.
I've tried many different combination
- KDE X11 on NVidia
- KDE X11 on integrated GPU
- KDE Wayland (it only works on integrated GPU, plasmashell doesn't start on NVidia)
- Gnome X11
- Gnome Wayland
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?
And why is sway listed in this? Isn't the whole point of using sway to do most, if not everything with the keyboard?
I really think I find myself better with trackpads than mouses for everything than copy pasting between editor/browser/chat/whatever.
