One thing i've seen desktop Linux struggle with, or rather the kernel or some other subsystem/drivers, is mouse and trackpad handling.
On OSX (and possibly Windows although its been a long time), its soooooo silky smooth. But on multiple Linux distros i've used, including Pop and Ubuntu, it just doesn't feel right even after adjusting all sorts of settings.
This is one thing thats kept me from full time Linux DE usage :(
I've shared my opinion before on why mouse/trackpad handling is terrible on most Linux distributions [0], thanks to a misguided obsession w/ rewriting the entire stack and throwing away vendor-provided acceleration curves (most recently in order to provide gesture support instead of just building it on top of the correct, working solution).
More importantly, there is a solution for fixing this and I've done my part by open sourcing a multi-touch gesture solution (userland daemon) that's driver-agnostic and runs on top of the vendor-provided drivers w/ their correct acceleration curves [1].
(But TBH I don't know if this applies to Apple's trackpad because I don't know if there are any first-party drivers w/ proper acceleration curves for Linux or if they've all been – unfortunately poorly – reverse engineered.)
Interesting. I came to accept the rewrite for libinput, considering it's being developed by the same developer as synaptics, and he/she who codes gets to decide whether to maintain something he/she considers a mess of course. However, the only possible reaction from my side was to leave behind what was causing physical pain for me and return to Mac OS. From past discussions ([1], [2]), it appears I'm far from the only one. I hope the extant desktop devs at Red Hat and elsewhere enjoy their big refactorings for the sake of it as a hobby (wayland, gnome, libinput, systemd) but man does it suck. It's such a regression I've given up any hope and think desktop Linux has already peaked around 2016-18.
Very cool. I am trying to compare the gesture support for syngesture and MacOS [0], which I have never used. In syngesture, it seems you can swipe left/right/up/down with 1-5 fingers.
In MacOS, there are additional things you can do.
* Spread or bring closer 2-4 fingers.
* Swipe from the edge to do a different action than swiping in the bulk of the pad.
Are there any system limitations on linux that prevent the implementation of such gestures?
Nice; I've been looking for a way to do two-finger-swipe -> Browser back/forward in Ubuntu/Pop for a few years now, and still haven't found a solution. Hoping this is it!
I'm using a Dell laptop, but I'm running vanilla GNOME on EndeavourOS (took out the distro-specific customizations in the installer), and its trackpad support seems perfect on mine. Everything is as smooth as I've seen on Windows or MacOS. The settings menu for it is nice. I especially like how it comes with a three-finger swipe left or right to switch workspaces/desktops, or a three-finger swipe up to get an overview of your current desktop. It all feels natural, and it gives me a sense of control; if I swipe slowly, it switches slowly, rather than just make the transition deterministically after I've swiped in some direction (something I've experienced elsewhere on Linux).
I also like that you can use two-fingers to zoom in on a webpage with Firefox, just as on Windows.
GNOME is the first DE I've tried where all of this touchpad support was implemented so well, although I haven't tried that many, to be fair.
Sorry if I sound like an advertisement; I just wanted to be specific about what I like about GNOME's trackpad support as opposed to just saying that it "works fine for me."
I'm running stock Fedora (which uses GNOME) on a Framework laptop and it's the same for me. It's the first time I've had Mac level trackpad support and UI responsiveness out of any non-Mac.. windows or Linux.
>it just doesn't feel right even after adjusting all sorts of settings.
personal opinion: have you looked at the sheer number of options exposed for a modern trackpad in linux?
it's insane; I don't really have any problem understanding the difficulty in achieving a good set of defaults -- there were like 200 exposed parameters the last time I tried to get it 'just right'. (a modern synaptics' touchpad on a new dell XPS.)
if I was on some quest to make it feel like Windows or OSX i'd probably have to give up -- not that those two feel better to me, but the sheer granularity is intimidating.
NOTE: this isn't to say that I dislike how the trackpad feels in Linux; I usually always get to a nice set of parameters that feels good to me, they just aren't the same as Windows or OSX, although I have little doubt that the granularity is there for someone to get it right.
I got forced by my employer to use a mac two years ago, and I had the exact opposite experience: the trackpad was so far from what I was used to (from reversed scroll motion, to the many accidental and undiscoverable multi-touch or smart gesture shennanigans) that I just hated it, and I soon plugged a mouse.
UX is a very subjective thing, and it depends a lot on your background: you're never going to feel instantly home when switching platform no matter how “polished” it is supposed to be.
The only unexpected gesture I had was the swipe back/forward a page (I've had the same issue on mobile as well) but I just disable this particular gesture. Which gestures did you find that you accidentally triggered?
Right now, at least on my machines, Linux/X11 is better than Windows.
I think that on macOS, the hardware is also miles ahead of what you can get on a pc. This isn't to downplay the software because I remember my MBP's touchpad being wonky under windows a few years back.
But things have improved. My HP EliteBook 845 G8 is fine under Linux/X11. Still somewhat worse than the 2013 MBP, but not nearly as horrible as the HP two generations back. I'd rate it as comparable to my 2012 unibody MBP.
Under windows, it's fine, too, but it has a weird lag if you pay attention.
Mac trackpad keeps getting mentioned as something that is leagues above the rest. I recently had to use MacBook air M2 and the trackpad was horrible. It was big but hard to use and it couldn't handle simple click and drag style of gesture that works on both windows and Linux. The buzzing feedback was random and confusing. I had to get a mouse after a few minutes struggling with it. For me experience on 15yo Dell with trackpad 1/4 the size feels superior to Mac.
I've never had a problem getting good mouse performance on Windows, under what circumstances are you noticing any lag?
Windows, like X11, uses a hardware mouse cursor. It sends a sprite to the GPU along with coordinates and it is drawn by the GPU outside your compositor's pipeline.
Trackpads are anything but standardized. For example those Apple's been using for quite a while now are built with the same touch controllers they use in iPhones (essentially making them iPhone screens sans screen panel), and on the extreme opposite end you've got cheap ones like is built into a Logitech media center combo board I bought several years ago which emulates a mouse instead of presenting itself to the connected device as a trackpad (and as you might expect, is terrible to use).
I'm using a Magic Trackpad 2; my experience has been just about perfect on KDE Wayland. GNOME's implementation is good too, but KDE's feels slightly more intuitive to me.
KDE gives you more granular trackpad settings than MacOS offers out-of-box, and the Wayland session has more gestures than you can shake a stick at. I think you owe yourself another visit :)
Seconded. On the rare times when I boot into the Windows partition on my laptop, the touchpad feels noticably better. Linux doesn't even handle all the quirks of my touchpad correctly so occasionally it'll get extremely slow and laggy, bordering on unusable! It's a Dell XPS-15 9510 and I haven't been able to solve this despite the laptop being out for almost two years. I've upgraded the touchpad firmware and the BIOS multiple times.
I'm also using an Apple trackpad on Linux (over both Bluetooth and USB) and it works absolutely fine. I didn't need to adjust any settings. It feels native. No difference whatsoever that I can perceive between this trackpad on Linux and on macOS.
I'm using a razor basilisk and it just feels so awful to use on linux. The best part of the mouse is the great scroll wheel(very similar to the mx master but better) and this part does not work at all on linux. Scrolling in general is just a total mess in linux and it frustrates me so much that I went back to windows. The mouse movements also feel so janky for reasons I can't really put my finger on.
I agree about the trackpad. I have two old Max Laptops running Ubuntu and the trackpad experience is perfect.
That said, I have a style involving sometimes using both index fingers on my System76 trackpad and the experience is really good, but to be honest it always takes me a minute to get in a groove with it.
I've been sponsoring the project since the beginning. They have to add support at all layers of the stack, and in Linux that's a lot of (moving) targets! Wayland, libinput, Firefox, Chrome, GNOME, KDE, etc... it's open source. We can't just sit around and complain.
For what it's worth, I've been using an Apple Magic Trackpad 2 for five+ years via USB and Bluetooth and it works well. Pinch to zoom, two-finger swipe for forward/backward in the browser, and others.
Linux have it but the acceleration curve is quite different from Windows' offering.
> A mouse acceleration feature accelerates the motion of your pointer. It enables users to move their pointer faster and cover more on-screen distance with merely a faster mouse movement rather than the physical distance the mouse covers.
I may just not be as picky as others but I have felt my System76 laptop's trackpad with PopOS is quite smooth. Improved from when I previously just installed Ubuntu on random Dell laptops.
My System76 laptop's trackpad is also very smooth. The only moment when the mouse freezes for a while (sometimes) is when using the default screenshot application.
I use pop os and for some nearly insanity level reason highlighting is VERY janky. It often looses focus, switches the start point, completely becomes unavailable, and generally has nearly driven me to go insane.
Apple's Magic Trackpad has a disappointingly low polling rate. It feels bad even on my Mac when using it with a 120hz display. The built-in trackpad on the other hand feels great. Is it possible this is your problem?
This is the first time in recent memory that a company's software has made me want to buy their hardware. They are doing such cool stuff with Pop_OS, figure my next laptop will be from System76.
I'm looking forward to their Virgo laptops, which will be designed and manufactured in-house instead of being rebadged Sager/Clevo laptops. If they're able to pair high-quality hardware with a high quality Linux desktop experience, I think a lot of developers will switch over.
I use their os on an old xps 13, and it's fully replaced ubuntu (I hate snaps!) as my go to distribution. It's pretty flawless.
I do hope they take the time to fully iron out the bugs on cosmic before making it the default. I was an early wayland adopter but after facing issue after issue, I eventually realized that the jump from xorg to wayland was all about making the developers life easier, with little to any benefit to me as an end user.
Yeah as I recall they simply buy a well known laptop from Asia and rebrand it (as a lot of other companies do), at least the first ones were not developed by them at all.
Genuine question, are any of the package manager "app store" style front ends actually nice to use right now? From my perspective having used several different distributions and environments over the course of the last ~15 years, they've all been "just ok" at best, very obviously webviews with some native chrome glued on, and had issues with resource usage, glitchy UI/UX, lagginess, etc.
Is it a matter of these particular bits not receive adequate attention or something else? I'm not opposed to trying to pitch in and help improve them but before that's feasible the root problem needs to be understood.
Is there any legitimate reason for this? I also find it generally unresponsive and it lags hard inbetween searches and clicks. I mean I always update from terminal but for how they’re trying to develop the desktop experience I don’t get why it takes up so many resources despite being sluggish
Recently, the keyboard and trackpad of my two-year-old laptop suddenly became a convex surface. Had to open a support ticket to ask how to get a replacement battery.
Many days later, I got a reply that it would be $120 + shipping and do I want to go ahead and order one? No advice on how to mitigate a potentially hazardous situation caused by their product and full retail price on replacing the defective part.
Pop!_OS:
Before I had actually moved into the laptop or installed anything (other than emacs and firefox), the package manager crapped itself with some circular dependency. As I started to work through unfucking the situation, it occurred to me this wasn't my fault and why am I putting up with this?
The designs for their most recent laptops are also freely and openly licensed, using the CERN Open Hardware License: https://github.com/system76/virgo/
The effort to write a DE in Rust (especially with iced) is impressive and will definitely improve Rust GUI efforts. I am surprised, however, the margins around buttons and layouts in the settings are uneven (eg. no margins around the "Wallpaper" title but large margins on the toggles on "Background fit" or "Slideshow"). Is this a beta thing, or how the UI is supposed to be designed?
It's better than it was in previous previews, which makes me think we're probably seeing the result of "get a bunch of shit done" with sprints of "now make it look better", cycle and repeat.
Before Plasma this was also an issue with KDE, I mean uneven or missing margins/paddings. Gnome always had that though I think. Hopefully they'll improve these kind of things, at least from a first try the UX feels very smooth. Also considering it's built by one company.
Can you provide any references on the DE being written with Rust + iced? That's huge news in my book. This would be, AFAIK, the first major production UI written with a Rust GUI framework.
Its use of iced is mentioned in the article itself, second paragraph from the bottom. That same paragraph has a link to cosmic-text on github & its Rust code.
I'm so stoked about a well supported tiling Wayland compositor! Now KDE/Gnome are the only secure options in a world where all others implement screen capture, virtual keyboard and virtual mouse interfaces without access restrictions (looking at you sway and all of wlroots)
These early results look very promising, it is really interesting to see the high quality and speed of iteration and they are tackling some hard problems such as High DPI right off the bat. Hoping to get to try this out soon
Although I am myself running PopOS LTS on my machine right now, for historical reasons, I see no value proposition compared to Debian 12. If their Cosmic DE does not handle scaling at least as good as KDE (which is alow bar) I won't use it.
Readit News
On OSX (and possibly Windows although its been a long time), its soooooo silky smooth. But on multiple Linux distros i've used, including Pop and Ubuntu, it just doesn't feel right even after adjusting all sorts of settings.
This is one thing thats kept me from full time Linux DE usage :(
Edit: i'm using an Apple trackpad.
More importantly, there is a solution for fixing this and I've done my part by open sourcing a multi-touch gesture solution (userland daemon) that's driver-agnostic and runs on top of the vendor-provided drivers w/ their correct acceleration curves [1].
(But TBH I don't know if this applies to Apple's trackpad because I don't know if there are any first-party drivers w/ proper acceleration curves for Linux or if they've all been – unfortunately poorly – reverse engineered.)
[0]: https://neosmart.net/blog/multi-touch-gestures-on-linux/
[1]: https://github.com/mqudsi/syngesture/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35313903
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35428847
In MacOS, there are additional things you can do.
* Spread or bring closer 2-4 fingers.
* Swipe from the edge to do a different action than swiping in the bulk of the pad.
Are there any system limitations on linux that prevent the implementation of such gestures?
[0] https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT204895
I also like that you can use two-fingers to zoom in on a webpage with Firefox, just as on Windows.
GNOME is the first DE I've tried where all of this touchpad support was implemented so well, although I haven't tried that many, to be fair.
Sorry if I sound like an advertisement; I just wanted to be specific about what I like about GNOME's trackpad support as opposed to just saying that it "works fine for me."
personal opinion: have you looked at the sheer number of options exposed for a modern trackpad in linux?
it's insane; I don't really have any problem understanding the difficulty in achieving a good set of defaults -- there were like 200 exposed parameters the last time I tried to get it 'just right'. (a modern synaptics' touchpad on a new dell XPS.)
if I was on some quest to make it feel like Windows or OSX i'd probably have to give up -- not that those two feel better to me, but the sheer granularity is intimidating.
NOTE: this isn't to say that I dislike how the trackpad feels in Linux; I usually always get to a nice set of parameters that feels good to me, they just aren't the same as Windows or OSX, although I have little doubt that the granularity is there for someone to get it right.
UX is a very subjective thing, and it depends a lot on your background: you're never going to feel instantly home when switching platform no matter how “polished” it is supposed to be.
I think that on macOS, the hardware is also miles ahead of what you can get on a pc. This isn't to downplay the software because I remember my MBP's touchpad being wonky under windows a few years back.
But things have improved. My HP EliteBook 845 G8 is fine under Linux/X11. Still somewhat worse than the 2013 MBP, but not nearly as horrible as the HP two generations back. I'd rate it as comparable to my 2012 unibody MBP.
Under windows, it's fine, too, but it has a weird lag if you pay attention.
Windows, like X11, uses a hardware mouse cursor. It sends a sprite to the GPU along with coordinates and it is drawn by the GPU outside your compositor's pipeline.
Trackpads are anything but standardized. For example those Apple's been using for quite a while now are built with the same touch controllers they use in iPhones (essentially making them iPhone screens sans screen panel), and on the extreme opposite end you've got cheap ones like is built into a Logitech media center combo board I bought several years ago which emulates a mouse instead of presenting itself to the connected device as a trackpad (and as you might expect, is terrible to use).
KDE gives you more granular trackpad settings than MacOS offers out-of-box, and the Wayland session has more gestures than you can shake a stick at. I think you owe yourself another visit :)
I use the same mouse on Mac, Linux, and windows. It feels exactly the same on each OS when configured to the same dpi/speed/accell and polling rate
Deleted Comment
You should give your Apple Trackpad a new try on the latest Gnome on Wayland.
That said, I have a style involving sometimes using both index fingers on my System76 trackpad and the experience is really good, but to be honest it always takes me a minute to get in a groove with it.
For what it's worth, I've been using an Apple Magic Trackpad 2 for five+ years via USB and Bluetooth and it works well. Pinch to zoom, two-finger swipe for forward/backward in the browser, and others.
Linux have it but the acceleration curve is quite different from Windows' offering.
> A mouse acceleration feature accelerates the motion of your pointer. It enables users to move their pointer faster and cover more on-screen distance with merely a faster mouse movement rather than the physical distance the mouse covers.
https://www.makeuseof.com/windows-10-disable-mouse-accelerat...
Maybe it is my mouse but I kinda doubt it.
Besides, there is nothing stopping you from using their DE on any other PC.
I do hope they take the time to fully iron out the bugs on cosmic before making it the default. I was an early wayland adopter but after facing issue after issue, I eventually realized that the jump from xorg to wayland was all about making the developers life easier, with little to any benefit to me as an end user.
Is it a matter of these particular bits not receive adequate attention or something else? I'm not opposed to trying to pitch in and help improve them but before that's feasible the root problem needs to be understood.
I would definitely not buy one if you're not in North America as there's a decent chance you'll need hardware support.
Hardware (darter pro 7, everything maxed):
Recently, the keyboard and trackpad of my two-year-old laptop suddenly became a convex surface. Had to open a support ticket to ask how to get a replacement battery.
Many days later, I got a reply that it would be $120 + shipping and do I want to go ahead and order one? No advice on how to mitigate a potentially hazardous situation caused by their product and full retail price on replacing the defective part.
Pop!_OS:
Before I had actually moved into the laptop or installed anything (other than emacs and firefox), the package manager crapped itself with some circular dependency. As I started to work through unfucking the situation, it occurred to me this wasn't my fault and why am I putting up with this?
Deleted Comment
[1]: https://blog.system76.com/post/november-at-system76-products...
The commenter is a System76 employee.
Six processes should not take milliseconds of anything, there's no reason displaying a few notifications should take this much CPU time.
The exclamation point rubs me wrong.
UNIX: not an acronym, but all-caps anyway
iOS: inverted titlecase helps us stand out
Microsoft® Windows™: these are our brand names! no trespassing!