[amalgamated_inc]

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.

[dijit]

it is quite likely that the cause is because of this project.

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.

[pmontra]

This is not my experience. My first Linux laptop was a HP nc8430 from 2006. I used it for two years with Windows and then reinstalled with Ubuntu 8.04. The touchpad was much better in Linux. I only used the touchpad to move the pointer and scroll, no gestures, no clock. I used the three physical buttons to click. My current laptop is a ZBook from 2014. I never used it with Windows but it's been good with all the Ubuntu LTS I used it with, all of them every second year, and with Debian 11. Again, I never clicked with the touchpad not used gestures. I always used X11. Probably the basics were always good enough on that hardware.

[amalgamated_inc]

I suspect that one issue is that you can buy REALLY cheap and terrible laptops and run Linux on them. You can't buy cheap Apple products. Therefore people compare the crappy touchpad from a $300 laptop with that of a $1,5000 MacBook or whatever they cost now. Obviously, that makes the Linux one look bad.

But the high-quality laptops that e.g. most devs on Linux use have had great touchpads for a long time.

[DennisP]

Not sure what you mean by "long time" but five or six years ago I bought a fairly expensive 17" laptop from System76 and the touchpad was atrocious. It was basically unusable, cursor jumped all over the place.

[dijit]

Not sure.

Ive had:

* Acer Aspire 5500G (cheap as hell)

* Thinkpad T400

* Thinkpad x200

* Thinkpad x201 and its “s” varient.

* HP Elitebook 8440

* HP Zbook G3

not cheap laptops really (save the first) and a bit dated by todays standards, but my experience comes from this context.

[pmontra]

Your HP hardware is one of two generations newer than what I used. The big difference between our experiences could be that I never used gestures and tap to click. If I had, maybe I wouldn't be happy with them.

I expand the rationale of my choices.

No tap to click: all the touchpads I used since late 90s used to move the pointer a little when I tapped. This is really bad in image editing programs. One could argue that I should use a mouse there and that is correct, but I don't use those programs much so I never have a mouse close to my desk. I think I never tested tap to click on this laptop I've been using since 2014.

No gestures: I use keyboard shortcuts and hotkeys. Learning gestures to replace them would probably save me very little time if any at all, so I never investigated them. The only one I can think to be useful is multifinger zoom, but ctrl + and - are good enough in most cases. I don't use them every month.

Anyway, I'm glad that they are working on those features. It helps the ecosystem and it could attract users. Unfortunately there are no workarounds for shitty hardware.

[jeroenhd]

It really depends on driver support. The Synaptic touch pads I've used have always worked great with gestures and such (under Wayland, which is still too buggy on my current hardware, sadly). Precision and responsiveness have always been great.

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.

[amalgamated_inc]

In which case, huge applause to the project :)

[smoldesu]

Yeah, on Wayland I've got pretty much everything I had on MacOS (besides Force Touch, which I never used anyhow). Using a Magic Trackpad on my Linux desktop feels very intuitive now, I gotta hand it to the people contributing input handling/gesture code.

[amalgamated_inc]

I'm on Wayland too, maybe that's it.