[ralphist]

> I filed an issue[1] on cosmic in hope they'll get it right, but I don't have too high hopes that this is of much interest.

That's insane but you're right. Firefox on Ubuntu had awful trackpad scrolling 10 years ago and it's still bad. How do you make an OS where the main pointing device on half of the market sucks and assign that low priority?

[Analemma_]

> How do you make an OS where the main pointing device on half of the market sucks and assign that low priority?

Because Linux isn't "an OS". It's a kernel made by one set of developers, combined with a bunch of operating systems made by a second set of developers, which pick and choose compositors/window managers/etc. often made by a third set of developers. Each of these sets of developers are pretty good at solving bugs that live entirely in their "domain", but when there's an issue which crosses these interface boundaries, there is nobody to "assign priority", never mind actually work to fix it.

(Not to mention, systemd demonstrates that trying to solve these kinds of pan-system problems earns you little gratitude but tons of vociferous hatred, so people are not inclined to do it.)

[ralphist]

That's why I mentioned Ubuntu; if anyone has incentive and resources to contribute to all these projects and get smooth scrolling working it's Canonical. If _they_ can't, I guess that means the whole community is screwed on that side. Maybe it's going to work 20 years from now, when we've moved on from trackpads to AI voice interfaces.

[culopatin]

In 20 years there will be so much baggage to fix that we’ll be at the same point we are now “ugh but you have to rewrite everything from the ground up and update so many programs…”

[sandreas]

That's what I think is the problem. And exactly the reason I thought cosmic could get this right. There is a lot of promising decisions in this project, but maybe it'll take a while to work as expected :-)

[pmontra]

I've been using Firefox on Ubuntu from 2009 to 2022, 08.10 to 22.04, then switched to Debian, but I never noticed any problem. I always used X11, a laptop, touchpad and two finger scrolling. Maybe is it a Wayland thing? Or it is very subjective.

[sandreas]

Noticing a problem and having smooth / improved scrolling are two different things. I think you can only notice the difference if you've ever used a macOS device with a trackpad for more than 2 weeks and then switched back to either Windows or Linux. It's just feels HORRIBILE for some people (like me).

The interesting thing: Some Distributions have smooth scrolling (or interial scrolling / kinetic scrolling) by default (Fedora, Ubuntu) and some don't. Those who have enabled it, have no speed setting, so most of the time it's way to fast. I tinkered around a very long time with libinput-config to get it right and now it's acceptable. But it is still waaay better on macOS.

It is NOT a hardware issue though. I tried "hackintosh" on my T460s, and the touchpad experience is nearly as good as on a MacBook, so it is mostly software / OS.

[crotchfire]

Smooth scrolling is something completely different, having to do with mousewheels.

Please don't perpetuate the awful terminological confusion around this issue.

[bmicraft]

Try enabling "XINPUT2" in firefox, you'd be surprised what a difference it makes

[pmontra]

I gave it a try. The difference is that XINPUT2 scroll has inertia: I start scrolling, remove the fingers from the touchpad and it keeps scrolling for a while. If I want to stop when I see something interesting I have to click or it will scroll away. That adds an extra action that must performed at the right time. I don't think I like that because this is not a videogame and Firefox is not supposed to challenge my abilities. I prefer the current behavior: it scrolls until I stop sliding my fingers on the touchpad. Then I have to move them up to the top of the touch pad and start again but I can scroll all the front page of HN in a single motion and it gives me time to check what I'm looking at, especially on longer pages (this comment thread.)

Anyway, it's nice to have different settings that suit different people.

[funcDropShadow]

Try it for some longer time. Scrolling on Macbook becomes subconscious. I don't think about it anymore. I don't even notice that I am moving my fingers. The scroll pane just moves where I want it to move. Simulating the behavior of physical objects allows our minds to reuse what it learned about the physical world. That is imho a very powerful user interface metaphor. But beware, this is just an anecdote.

[pmontra]

There are two other problems I thought about later:

1) It's too fast. My Android phone also scrolls like XINPUT2 but it's got a smaller acceleration. But maybe it's what you say about getting used to it.

2) That would work in Firefox and every other window would still scroll in the other way. That's really bad and works against getting used to a specific scrolling behavior. I don't get it: the scrolling behavior should be managed at a level below every application. All the scrollbars should behave in only one way, except the random application that implements its own logic because of some important reason. So I would expect a system wide setting for XINPUT2 or traditional scrolling.

[bmicraft]

> I start scrolling, remove the fingers from the touchpad and it keeps scrolling for a while

If you want it to not scroll further you need to stop scrolling before lifting you fingers. That should be pretty easy to get used to.

[t-3]

The pointing device doesn't suck, just the defaults (and probably the graphical configuration tools - I always use CLI and editing config files but most open-source GUIs are horrible). If you're willing to spend 5-10 minutes tweaking, you can get exactly the same performance or better just by playing around with some settings.

[sandreas]

You're right, after tinkering around I also found settings that are ok. But that's only part of it. There are so many things that just work better on macOS, e.g. the "tap-to-stop" or "vertical-scrolling".

I also think that the App developers should not have to shoulder this. App developers have way better things to do than care about touchpad events... like fixing issues and developing new features. I don't see where smooth scrolling should be an App feature...

[ralphist]

That's only going to affect part of your apps though. Last I checked, Firefox on Ubuntu finally had a kind of pixel-perfect scrolling, but it wasn't smooth and didn't keep momentum if you let go of the trackpad while scrolling fast. That just feels bad, even after getting used to it.

And Qt apps will scroll differently than the GNOME project's apps which will scroll differently than other Gtk apps. It really feels disorganized and unfinished.

[Sammi]

This doesn't help me. I have zero confidence I can do any of this.