Perfectly replicating a Mac trackpad on a Linux system might be the final push for me to switch. Once those gestures are part of your flow, they are almost impossible to live without. It is one of the primary things Apple has ever gotten consistently right.
PSH. They dont even know up from down.
It’s designed like pushing paper towards you or away from you—I actually find it more natural. Imagine the screen is a long piece of paper continuing down to your hand and you’ll see what I mean. Push away to push the screen up, pull towards yourself to pull the screen down.
Plus, if you don’t like it, it is easily customized in the trackpad preferences.
It’s great to see how different people priorities are! For me this is one of the least interesting features ever, I have never used a laptop with a trackpad to do any (meaningful) work. That said, I am really glad if people with different priorities will get the chance to have their preferred flow in Linux!
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Smooth scrolling? Scrolling on linux isn’t smooth? 😶🌫️ Does mac have some kind of delay with an ease in / ease out?
There’s a lot of different aspects to a good touchpad experience but from my knowledge linux distros do not implement smooth scrolling, apps have to do it individually
But what is smooth scrolling? It’s a serious question.
I always thought my scrolling experience was quite fluid. Even used a mac for about a week and went back to linux without missing anything.
responsive, high fps scrolling instead of big discrete jumps. Makes it feel like there’s a direct connection between your finger movement and the content on screen. I’m guessing you’re either using mainly apps that already have decent smooth scrolling or maybe you just aren’t sensitive to it. There’s also kinetic scrolling, where stuff will keep moving after your finger lifts as if it had momentum, the acceleration profile and some other stuff. I’m not sure how much this post covers
Interesting. Probably I’m not sensitive to it. Most of the stuff I scroll through is code and it would annoy me to no end to have it scroll and show me half a line at the bottom and top of the screen.
Just noticed that my browser also has smooth scrolling enabled (by default I assume) and turning it off, I see the difference. But given I have apps that don’t and never noticed means it never was important to me.
Thanks for explaining.
Nice. I’m using a dell 7440 latitude with Mint Cinnamon and the track pad is glitchy to say the least.
Nice. I’ve personally been using Linux on a Mid 2012, and the touchpad responsiveness + gesture support has been one of my favorite things about the experience.
Really nice to see gestures in general getting more support in the wider Linux dev community 👍
Where exactly is this downloadable? I read the blog post and followed the links and still haven’t figured out what to do.
It would be nice if libinput had any idea about scaling touchpad scrolling. You can make something that isn’t entirely terrible by lying about your trackpad size and some other crap, but it is a royal pita.
