Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by LoganDark 1117 days ago
GNOME supports my trackpad better than Windows and, dare I say it, macOS does. As in, it literally supports trackpad gestures and inputs that Apple doesn't, and it's actually really smooth and responsive.

You can right-click-drag, and you can middle click. macOS doesn't support either one of these, and Windows only supports assigning a bottom-right quadrant of the trackpad to right-clicking.
2 comments
mort96 1117 days ago
GNOME has the fatal flaw that you can't configure trackpad scroll sensitivity. That means, if your trackpad is too sensitive out of the box, GNOME is simply unusable. Every laptop I've used in the past many years (a couple of Dells and a Mac) have had touch pads with too sensitive scrolling in GNOME.

It's fine in Sway or KDE, as they have scroll sensitivity settings.

link
LoganDark 1117 days ago
> GNOME has the fatal flaw that you can't configure trackpad scroll sensitivity.

Oh, I got bitten by that actually. I ended up just configuring Firefox since that was the main app I used, but most apps aren't Firefox and don't have settings for things that they would expect to be handled by your WM/DE/DM.

link
kaba0 1116 days ago
AFAIK it is a fundamental GTK problem, so Sway or KDE can only circumvent it for GTK apps.
link
mort96 1115 days ago
I don't believe it's a fundamental GTK problem. When you scroll, the Wayland compositor sends scroll events to the app, with a float for the delta. KWin and Sway have an option to let you multiply that delta with a constant; multiply it by 0.5 and you have halved your scroll speed. GNOME doesn't have such an option.

GTK may have other scroll issues as well (I recall seeing some stuff about that, though I don't remember the details), but there is definitely stuff the compositor can do.

link
kaba0 1113 days ago
> When you scroll, the Wayland compositor sends scroll events to the app, with a float for the delta

GTK works through a bunch of heuristics and in-built multipliers, but the fundamental problem is that scroll effect depends on the “weight” of the content itself — kinematic scrolling is unfortunately quite missing from linux desktop, AFAIK. But do correct me if you know better, I’m not too well versed in that.

link
thewataccount 1117 days ago
I wish there was an equivalent to "better touch tool" for linux, that program adds so many trackpad/other peripheral shortcuts and gestures it's crazy and doesn't involve editing config files from a wiki and half a dozen stack overflow pages.
link