Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mort96 1112 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.

2 comments

> 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.

AFAIK it is a fundamental GTK problem, so Sway or KDE can only circumvent it for GTK apps.
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.

> 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.