Perhaps the only thing other than a certain leviathan that I loathe in Linux, is the touchpad. I have butchered laptops as a result of touchpad induced madness. I've tried synclient and other tweaks to no sufferable avail. My present laptop has the touchpad removed by pliers. I used the term "madness" sincerely. I think the present situation might be eligible for a place in the wiki for Unethical Human Experimentation. Of course, Linux is not entirely to blame; the physical quality has declined immensely for most touch/clickpads.
Perhaps someday I'll experience playing go without a mouse and risk of hypertension.
I'm typically not one to use the term - but godspeed, in this case!
I love this and your subsequent responses. I want to share one of my own.
A few years back -- so I cannot blame the pandemic -- I was fed up with my old Dell XPS. It was originally a pretty awesome laptop, but it was reaching the end of its useful life and it had many quirks. One was a key that was acting weird. In a fit of rage -- and I trust you'll understand me -- I decided to remove the key to see what was the deal, and proceeded to disassemble the whole laptop to do so, tugging at cables, forcing the case, twisting things out of the way. Because YouTube tutorials weren't clear enough, I ended up destroying the laptop. I didn't even find the reason the key was acting up.
With the laptop re-assembled but clearly beat up, parts of it destroyed, my wife arrived, took a look and said:
"You know you could have removed the key without dismantling the laptop, right?" and proceeded to show me how. In my rage I hadn't even considered this.
My ThinkPad has two sets of buttons - one with a middle mouse button below the spacebar, and one with just left and right click below the trackpad that practically hangs off the bezel.
Fortunately, the trackpad flex cable only connects to the bottom pair of buttons, so unplugging the flex cable is a completely non-destructive process that leaves the trackpoint and mouse buttons completely functional and makes my laptop somewhat secure against other people trying to use it! I will admit that this non-destructive method lacks the catharsis that pliers could provide.
By the way, modern touchpads support HID feature reports to disable surface and buttons. Usages 0x57 / 0x58 in the Digitizer page. The Linux driver is aware of those but uses them only to ensure that everything is turned on. I think that it really should expose an interface for a user to control those bits.
Have you considered (if you’re in a position to) purchasing a tablet to use as an oversized trackpad? My Wacom has come in a handy a few times I didn’t want to use the pen and I forgot my mouse somewhere (my laptop trackpad is not great).
I've set easy keyboard shortcuts to enable/disable the touchpad, and that has been working for me. But I understand how you feel, the palm rejection is especially terrible, no matter how I try to tweak it.
I can hardly tell the difference between my razer stealth linux touchpad and my workprovided macbook.
Even based on the feedback, it seems that most people are okay with their touchpad experience and are more interested in advanced features like multitouch.
Having this said, for myself this is a tough sell. I'm concerned that I would donate and I won't be able to tell the difference between this and some placebo drivers.
I'm in exactly the same spot with a (reasonably old 2017 model) Dell XPS.
Wayland with libinput has been a JOY to use compared to basically anything I've used in linux before.
I tried running an X based DE about 2 years ago on this machine and actually went back to running it in a VM in windows because the touchpad felt so shoddy.
No problems at all with the current setup. Can barely tell the different between my work Mac and the XPS.
Yeah I don't have a problem with either my Asus Zenbook or my HP Envy.
Reading through the comments it sounds like the real problem is Thinkpad trackpads suck for whatever reason and this is somehow getting extrapolated to "Linux trackpads suck".
Testing my (several years old) XPS 13, perhaps the back 1/4 is noticeably harder to click than the rest, and the very back 5-7 mm is unclickable.
I have to say I've never noticed that before. I always use tap-to-click (whether on macs or non-macs) and most of the time I click using the front 1/2 of the pad anyway. If I weren't using tap-to-click the dead zone would probably bother me though.
Well, I'm using tap to click which is what I prefer.
On the macbook pro I'm using clicks because tapping doesn't work as well as reliably, for example tap and drag.
Later edit - I tried comparing the clickable area, and indeed, the upper region is not clickable on my razer (TIL). I realized this only just now, because this not how I usually use touchpads.
Do you click with your "aiming" finger? I usually have tap-to-click turned on and do tap that way, but on any touchpad, MacBooks primarily until recently, I always click with my thumb on the bottom quarter, where older touchpads had a separate button. Is this only because I started on those old-style touchpads?
This is still the most frustrating thing about Linux for me. I have two Thinkpads, a T460 running Windows from my employer, and a T560 running Ubuntu as my personal. Their touchpad hardware is, of course, identical. The experiences couldn't be more different.
When I first got the machine, I spent weeks fighting with the driver, trying to figure out how a single number can represent four lines on two dimensions to define a region where palm-touch should be ignored. I still haven't gotten pointer precision where I'd like it; I simply know that getting within ten pixels is the best I can hope for without infuriatingly slow rocking and coaxing my finger around. It's disappointing to say the least.
Honestly what I'd like most, is a WINE-like shim to simply let me run the Windows driver in some sort of sandbox and take its mouse-events to the Linux input system. Synaptics has clearly done the work to make the thing behave the way I'd like, and it would be the coolest thing if identical settings were equivalent and portable between machines.
Am I the only one who finds the Synaptics trackpads on many laptops are simply a nightmare in itself regardless of the operating system due to the physical design? Not all Synaptics trackpads are created equal, on some machines, the surface friction just doesn't feel correct, making the pointer acceleration difficult to control. I know I was probably using it wrong and I should've spent an hour tweaking the parameters in the Synaptics Windows Driver, but I don't really know what's the best for me. Even worse, some Synaptics trackpads have cheap plastic that worn out after a year or so, creating an uneven friction, making the navigation a difficult experience. I know I could replace it, but making the touchpad as a consumable item is not a good design. Also, on many ultralight machines, the available space is simply too small to have an adequate space for plamrest.
Finally, as a matter of personal preference, I found clicking the button on the touchpad is never a good experience - the pad is clickable, but only on its edge, or you could touch-click, but you need to constantly lifting your finger. The touch gestures are confusing as well, to this day I never figured out any of the gesture I could use. The device driver really should come with an animated tutorial. The only feature I found was scrolling at the edge or double-finger scrolling, but it's only useful if you want to scroll a few lines, rolling the entire page is a tiresome experience (unlike the middle-button scrolling on a TrackPoint).
As a result, I only use the TrackPoint on Thinkpad laptops. Although the TrackPoint is not completely free from the pointer acceleration issue in general on Linux (although I never found it to be an issue for me), the overall usability is much better because it doesn't have the physical design issues.
I read everything I could about what the project aims to accomplish, and none of it sounds like the things I find frustrating. Making it "more like a Mac" will not solve a single one of my issues. Palm touch ranked super low and pointer precision wasn't even mentioned. So, no.
> There's currently a gaping chasm between the 35 sponsors who have supported the project on GitHub so far (thank you!!!) and the 309 poll respondents who indicated they would donate to this cause.
I answered the poll, and said I would pay $50 for this, but never received any follow up (and I think I provided my email, I usually do in polls if they give the option).
Now I just realized that there is a github sponsor link, but it's recurring. I don't want recurring. I want to send $50 once.
The poll respondents did not indicate they would be willing to donate to the cause. They indicated they would be willing to donate to "fix it". There is a very big difference between paying to fix a problem and paying for a stranger to work on a project that may end up fixing the problem one day.
Well, let me put it this way. I would donate $250 to fix it. I think that's how much working support for touch, trackpad, and pen input would be worth it to me.
I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves.
I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" approach), especially with the claimed problem, solution, and approaches.
With open source, it's easy to find people to do the fun, modular bits (acceleration curves, palm rejection, etc.). It's hard to find people to do the plumbing and the not-fun bits. If OP were to create a pipeline which:
* Supported the broad range of trackpads, tablets, styluses, etc. on the market
* Did this with clean abstractions and modular drivers (NOT wrappers around wrappers around wrappers of what other people have written, but the painful work of refactoring other people's code)
* Integrated with the desktop properly, potentially extending existing standards if necessary (NOT tried to replace the desktop with yet another standard no one supports)
* Handled the odd-ball cases (a touchscreen, a drawing tablet, a drawing display, AND a plain old monitor are plugged into a box. What happens?)
* Provided clean, simple, documented, pluggable APIs where people could tinker around with the fun stuff (anyone can make a new algorithm in Python and see it work in 5 minutes)
That would solve the problem.
For reference, their approach: "(1) evaluate which multi-touch features can be implemented with the least work 2) start to quantify the current nature of palm detection 3) measure how the acceleration curve of Linux touchpad compares to that of macOS. I have some ideas on how we might calibrate the acceleration curve to better match macOS, but it would be handy if anyone else has bright ideas on how they would attempt to quantify the touchpad acceleration curve on macOS (such that we can seek to match it here)."
I could be wrong about all of this, but that's what it would take for ME to donate. I guess the other approach is to accomplish something yourself and establish a track record. I WILL instead donate to DIGImend, where a lone developer seems to heroically be successfully bringing tablet support to Linux. That's an example of a track record.
> If OP were to create a pipeline which: ... That would solve the problem.
The libinput project and pipeline was developed as a way of pursuing these goals, but it doesn't even have all the features of the legacy synaptics driver. It's not hard to see where the work should be going: start with bringing libinput up to feature parity (and fork the project if maintainers won't accept your changes upstream), then go further from there.
> I have some ideas on how we might calibrate the acceleration curve to better match macOS, but it would be handy if anyone else has bright ideas on how they would attempt to quantify the touchpad acceleration curve on macOS
Reverse engineer the drivers and platform frameworks?
> With open source, it's easy to find people to do the fun, modular bits (acceleration curves, palm rejection, etc.).
If that were true, there wouldn't be crowds of people telling that palm rejection in Linux sucks balls. Seriously.
As someone who did dabble in libinput for my own needs, I probably qualify to tell you where exactly you can shove your $250 and your condescending ignorant attitude, and how deep you can shove it, too, along with the horse you rode in on.
For me the problem is that the minimum of $5 per month is just too much. I would like to see this work done, but not for $60 a year (plus fees?). I fall into the category of being alright with the state of my trackpad, so $60 is just more than I will give.
Off topic but did anyone else notice that this entire blog post is actually hosted on a site called amplenote? With uMatrix enabled, the wordpress blog just shows an empty post with a broken iframe. Is this a common architecture? What's the purpose?
Just to be clear my settings deliberately block iframes by default until I allow them. I just thought it was odd that the whole Wordpress blog is literally window dressing.
I've used a mac occasionally and there are really only two features I miss from the trackpad level:
- Add a finger to click. This is very useful to be able to click without stopping dragging your finger.
- The acceleration curve for pointing feels more natural. This was surprising to me because I use Linux primarily but I feel like I hit targets slightly more on MacOS.
With libinput I have found that multi-touch gestures work really well we are just missing application support. It seems that this project doesn't aim to work on applications at all so for me it seems like they are barking up the wrong tree. For example I would love to have Firefox wired up to linux three-finger swipe gestures for forward/back (and I bind down -> Scroll To Top and up -> Close tab).
I guess it helps not to get used to "better experiences" just judging by the comments here. I bought a laptop and and have dual boot but use linux primarily. Every time I'd have to use Windows, it would be a serious frustrating pain in the ass. A lot of these things I am 999% convinced are just based on familiarity than actual ergonomics.
Well, the Mac trackpad is an absolute joy to use..
The quality of trackpads outside of Macs used to annoy me to no end, but my 2018 zenbook with libinput isn't that bad. It's like 80% of the way there for a quarter of the price.
that's the main problem with suse, rh, Ubuntu, ibm etc contributing to linux. they pay designers doing a job on their macbooks or windows. Ubuntu went as far as forking the WM and suse for the longest time looked like every application was a windows installation wizard.
Looks like the number of contributors have doubled since this post hit the frontpage.
That's great, this is one of the few things left that held back Linux desktop, and it wasn't even that bad with some tweaking but it shouldn't need tweaking. Gnome has made drastic improvements in recent years as well.
Now if only companies would fund proper open source graphics drivers then there would be no reason for developers to not use Linux. Otherwise you need to buy a laptop with Linux in mind and you'll be fine.
Re GPU: Running a desktop with a shiny new AMD 5700-xt, and it has been pretty excellent. Only nit to pick is that I had to add a small bit of configuration to enable FreeSync support with my monitor.
Performance in various Steam games (native as well as emulated via Proton) has not been a disappointment.
That said, previously had an NVidia card that worked okay with Ubuntu, but required enabling some proprietary drivers. It worked fine, but was an extra hoop to jump, and using proprietary drivers sticks in my craw.
If I did anything on my desktop that relied on CUDA, I suspect I’d be stuck with using the proprietary NVidia drivers.
Readit News
Perhaps someday I'll experience playing go without a mouse and risk of hypertension.
I'm typically not one to use the term - but godspeed, in this case!
Under which circumstances is disabling it on a software level insufficient?
A few years back -- so I cannot blame the pandemic -- I was fed up with my old Dell XPS. It was originally a pretty awesome laptop, but it was reaching the end of its useful life and it had many quirks. One was a key that was acting weird. In a fit of rage -- and I trust you'll understand me -- I decided to remove the key to see what was the deal, and proceeded to disassemble the whole laptop to do so, tugging at cables, forcing the case, twisting things out of the way. Because YouTube tutorials weren't clear enough, I ended up destroying the laptop. I didn't even find the reason the key was acting up.
With the laptop re-assembled but clearly beat up, parts of it destroyed, my wife arrived, took a look and said:
"You know you could have removed the key without dismantling the laptop, right?" and proceeded to show me how. In my rage I hadn't even considered this.
I wanted to buy a new laptop, anyway!
Fortunately, the trackpad flex cable only connects to the bottom pair of buttons, so unplugging the flex cable is a completely non-destructive process that leaves the trackpoint and mouse buttons completely functional and makes my laptop somewhat secure against other people trying to use it! I will admit that this non-destructive method lacks the catharsis that pliers could provide.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Even based on the feedback, it seems that most people are okay with their touchpad experience and are more interested in advanced features like multitouch.
Having this said, for myself this is a tough sell. I'm concerned that I would donate and I won't be able to tell the difference between this and some placebo drivers.
Wayland with libinput has been a JOY to use compared to basically anything I've used in linux before.
I tried running an X based DE about 2 years ago on this machine and actually went back to running it in a VM in windows because the touchpad felt so shoddy.
No problems at all with the current setup. Can barely tell the different between my work Mac and the XPS.
From my view, this whole issue is resolved.
Reading through the comments it sounds like the real problem is Thinkpad trackpads suck for whatever reason and this is somehow getting extrapolated to "Linux trackpads suck".
How much of the surface of the Linux touchpad is clickable? I.e. how much of it depresses when you press on it, vs. the MacBook?
I’ve never seen a non-Apple touchpad that didn’t have a big dead zone in the back (closest to the display) 1/4 to 1/3 of the surface.
I have to say I've never noticed that before. I always use tap-to-click (whether on macs or non-macs) and most of the time I click using the front 1/2 of the pad anyway. If I weren't using tap-to-click the dead zone would probably bother me though.
On the macbook pro I'm using clicks because tapping doesn't work as well as reliably, for example tap and drag.
Later edit - I tried comparing the clickable area, and indeed, the upper region is not clickable on my razer (TIL). I realized this only just now, because this not how I usually use touchpads.
When I first got the machine, I spent weeks fighting with the driver, trying to figure out how a single number can represent four lines on two dimensions to define a region where palm-touch should be ignored. I still haven't gotten pointer precision where I'd like it; I simply know that getting within ten pixels is the best I can hope for without infuriatingly slow rocking and coaxing my finger around. It's disappointing to say the least.
Honestly what I'd like most, is a WINE-like shim to simply let me run the Windows driver in some sort of sandbox and take its mouse-events to the Linux input system. Synaptics has clearly done the work to make the thing behave the way I'd like, and it would be the coolest thing if identical settings were equivalent and portable between machines.
Finally, as a matter of personal preference, I found clicking the button on the touchpad is never a good experience - the pad is clickable, but only on its edge, or you could touch-click, but you need to constantly lifting your finger. The touch gestures are confusing as well, to this day I never figured out any of the gesture I could use. The device driver really should come with an animated tutorial. The only feature I found was scrolling at the edge or double-finger scrolling, but it's only useful if you want to scroll a few lines, rolling the entire page is a tiresome experience (unlike the middle-button scrolling on a TrackPoint).
As a result, I only use the TrackPoint on Thinkpad laptops. Although the TrackPoint is not completely free from the pointer acceleration issue in general on Linux (although I never found it to be an issue for me), the overall usability is much better because it doesn't have the physical design issues.
Now I just realized that there is a github sponsor link, but it's recurring. I don't want recurring. I want to send $50 once.
I can afford a few bucks to help somebody to attempt to solve the problem. I'm even ok with failure as long as it's an honest attempt.
I would donate $0 for a stranger on the internet to try to fix it themselves.
I would donate $0 and advise others not to donate with an approach where there isn't even a developer driving this themselves ("Give us money, and we'll hire someone to fix it" approach), especially with the claimed problem, solution, and approaches.
With open source, it's easy to find people to do the fun, modular bits (acceleration curves, palm rejection, etc.). It's hard to find people to do the plumbing and the not-fun bits. If OP were to create a pipeline which:
* Supported the broad range of trackpads, tablets, styluses, etc. on the market
* Did this with clean abstractions and modular drivers (NOT wrappers around wrappers around wrappers of what other people have written, but the painful work of refactoring other people's code)
* Integrated with the desktop properly, potentially extending existing standards if necessary (NOT tried to replace the desktop with yet another standard no one supports)
* Handled the odd-ball cases (a touchscreen, a drawing tablet, a drawing display, AND a plain old monitor are plugged into a box. What happens?)
* Provided clean, simple, documented, pluggable APIs where people could tinker around with the fun stuff (anyone can make a new algorithm in Python and see it work in 5 minutes)
That would solve the problem.
For reference, their approach: "(1) evaluate which multi-touch features can be implemented with the least work 2) start to quantify the current nature of palm detection 3) measure how the acceleration curve of Linux touchpad compares to that of macOS. I have some ideas on how we might calibrate the acceleration curve to better match macOS, but it would be handy if anyone else has bright ideas on how they would attempt to quantify the touchpad acceleration curve on macOS (such that we can seek to match it here)."
I could be wrong about all of this, but that's what it would take for ME to donate. I guess the other approach is to accomplish something yourself and establish a track record. I WILL instead donate to DIGImend, where a lone developer seems to heroically be successfully bringing tablet support to Linux. That's an example of a track record.
https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?c=930980https://liberapay.com/spbnick/donatehttps://www.buymeacoffee.com/spbnick
I'm sure this will go -5, since most critical posts do, but I find critical feedback to be more important than positivisty.
edit: Just donated to DIGImend.
The libinput project and pipeline was developed as a way of pursuing these goals, but it doesn't even have all the features of the legacy synaptics driver. It's not hard to see where the work should be going: start with bringing libinput up to feature parity (and fork the project if maintainers won't accept your changes upstream), then go further from there.
Reverse engineer the drivers and platform frameworks?
If that were true, there wouldn't be crowds of people telling that palm rejection in Linux sucks balls. Seriously.
As someone who did dabble in libinput for my own needs, I probably qualify to tell you where exactly you can shove your $250 and your condescending ignorant attitude, and how deep you can shove it, too, along with the horse you rode in on.
Edit: I'd gladly donate $2 or $3 per month.
With libinput I have found that multi-touch gestures work really well we are just missing application support. It seems that this project doesn't aim to work on applications at all so for me it seems like they are barking up the wrong tree. For example I would love to have Firefox wired up to linux three-finger swipe gestures for forward/back (and I bind down -> Scroll To Top and up -> Close tab).
Deleted Comment
The quality of trackpads outside of Macs used to annoy me to no end, but my 2018 zenbook with libinput isn't that bad. It's like 80% of the way there for a quarter of the price.
That's great, this is one of the few things left that held back Linux desktop, and it wasn't even that bad with some tweaking but it shouldn't need tweaking. Gnome has made drastic improvements in recent years as well.
Now if only companies would fund proper open source graphics drivers then there would be no reason for developers to not use Linux. Otherwise you need to buy a laptop with Linux in mind and you'll be fine.
Performance in various Steam games (native as well as emulated via Proton) has not been a disappointment.
That said, previously had an NVidia card that worked okay with Ubuntu, but required enabling some proprietary drivers. It worked fine, but was an extra hoop to jump, and using proprietary drivers sticks in my craw.
If I did anything on my desktop that relied on CUDA, I suspect I’d be stuck with using the proprietary NVidia drivers.