[HN Gopher] Q3 Linux touchpad update: Multitouch gesture test pa...
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Q3 Linux touchpad update: Multitouch gesture test packages now
ready
Author : wbharding
Score : 251 points
Date : 2020-10-06 17:54 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bill.harding.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (bill.harding.blog)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why does ChromeOS have all of the stuff that this project claims
| to be developing? Are they using proprietary touchpad drivers?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The whole ChromeOS UI and input stack is entirely different
| from a typical Linux desktop. I'm not sure there's a lot there
| that could be shared out to the Linux X11 desktop world.
| criddell wrote:
| Is there something about the standard Linux input stack that
| makes it especially difficult to create a great touchpad
| experience?
|
| Apple got it right a long time ago, ChromeOS is good, and
| Windows is too. What's different about Linux?
| dastx wrote:
| Apple got it right because they built a stable api around
| it, and integrated all their applications with it.
|
| Linux hasn't got it right because there is still no unified
| api, even if there was, all apps must implement it to be
| useful.
|
| This is where OP push comes in. To make all of this
| possible through donations. You should read his older blog
| posts. They're worth a read.
| vetinari wrote:
| Apple supports only their own touchpads, ChromeOS also
| selected ones. Windows provides the great experience only
| for the Precision touchpads (i.e. not even to Apples under
| Bootcamp). Linux is expected to work with random crap, that
| even its vendors have given up upon.
|
| That's the difference.
| mdoms wrote:
| Linux input still sucks with hardware that works great on
| other OS's.
| vetinari wrote:
| That's exactly not the point.
|
| The point was, that the other OSes picked specific
| hardware and they provide great experience only on that
| hand-picked hardware and nothing else. I specifically
| noted, that Apple touchpads do not work under Bootcamp as
| nicely as the Precision ones do, as an example.
| laksdjfkasljdf wrote:
| I still have no idea what this project is trying to do
| _exactly_.
|
| I always got decent multitouch on linux (when the touchpad is
| even recognized, but that's another problem).
| cxcorp wrote:
| The first post's discussion is here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17547817
| listennexttime wrote:
| It's okay, neither does the blog author. Despite their only
| value-add being a PM-role, they aren't doing a good job of
| that either.
|
| As evidenced by the fact that they've basically just resorted
| to doing tons of retrofit to bring _benefits that already
| exist in Wayland_ to a legacy, deprecated, aging stack.
| (literally every single change listed). Also, it 's no longer
| just about improving the touchpad (since libinput is already
| pushing the envelope there), and instead ... X11 Gestures?
| Okay? (Good luck to those brave enough to install a patched
| X11 from a PPA!)
|
| I feel sorry for the people who thought there was enough
| substance to donate. How this project progresses with
| increasingly less clarity and continues to be celebrated here
| deeply confuses me.
| p12tic wrote:
| Povilas from the linked blog post here.
|
| The reasons why we chose the current path were explained in
| detail in the blog posts.
|
| Touchpad gestures was the most popular feature to
| implement. In order to do that we needed a good reason why
| all the other project maintainers would want to spend time
| discussing a feature with us. Wayland is the future, yes,
| but currently a lot of users are still on X which makes our
| argument much less convincing. Now we can say that touchpad
| gestures will soon be available everywhere and get their
| attention this way.
|
| I agree that X is legacy platform. Unfortunately it may
| still be used for quite some time. Core functionality such
| as screenshots and input record/replay is not universally
| available on Wayland. So X will still be used for
| significant amount of time.
|
| Please tell me what else I could explain to increase the
| transparency of the project and I'll try my best to do so.
| Thanks!
| tssva wrote:
| Did you actually talk to other project maintainers and
| get feedback that they would only be interested if it
| were also available for X before starting down this path?
| p12tic wrote:
| I haven't asked this question unfortunately. Adding
| touchpad gestures needs changes in every GUI toolkit
| library except GTK and every application we would like to
| support. So I trusted my own experience of seeing the
| amount of effort needed to contribute an improvement for
| niche use cases. To make matters worse, an initial OK
| from a maintainer often does not really mean a lot. What
| matters is the actual time commitment to discuss design
| and review patches. Issues that increase the amount of
| effort needed for long-term maintenance and end-user
| support tend to decrease maintainer engagement a lot.
| Wayland-only touchpad gestures splits the user-base long
| term and thus fits this criteria very well.
|
| At this moment I'm not really sure if I would go the same
| path had I knew all the information I know now. Having
| said that, we've only spent around a single man-month of
| effort working on this. In the grand scheme of things
| this detour is tiny.
| [deleted]
| zelly wrote:
| Yes, Synaptics produces closed-source drivers for Windows and
| ChromeOS. ChromeOS also uses its own low-level input/graphics
| stack, not X11, so even if you had the code to it you wouldn't
| be able to just compile it on GNU/Linux.
| SahAssar wrote:
| ChromeOS has taken the path of Android on a lot of things, so
| drivers are usually hard to mainline.
| tpush wrote:
| What driver stack is Google using for ChromeOS? Is it
| proprietary? I assume all the Chromebooks have decent touchpad
| functionality, can't that be mainlined or whatever?
| quaa55 wrote:
| i believe chromeos uses a custom kernel with their own stack.
| nmstoker wrote:
| I get the reasons recurring sponsorship helps projects, but is
| there any chance to sponsor as a one time payment?
|
| As a resident of a non-USD country, my bank shafts me for foreign
| currency payments, which is partly a fixed fee and partly driven
| by the total amount. Therefore lots of small payments ends up
| paying a much larger portion to the bank, money that I'd
| otherwise prefer the project got!
| dastx wrote:
| > but is there any chance to sponsor as a one time payment?
|
| You can simply start a monthly plan, then cancel it once the
| first payment is gone. It's a bit more overhead, but if you
| believe in it, it's worth it.
|
| Also, slightly off-topic, and this entirely depends on where
| you live. Regarding your bank, you may be able to look into
| start up banks (also called Neo banks), they often have zero
| foreign currency fees and exchange at the Master Card or Visa
| base exchange rate. This has in the past saved me a huge
| amount, mostly for travel to foreign countries, but also for
| purchases, however, receiving money is the same.
|
| As examples, in the UK we have Starling, Monzo and some others
| that all give you zero foreign exchange transaction fees. In
| many European countries Revolut is available (also in the UK),
| but I closed my account with them for ethical reasons. There is
| undoubtedly more neo banks available especially in the
| development world but you will need to do research for your
| country.
| rhodysurf wrote:
| I created an extension for GNOME a while ago to add custom
| multitouch gesture actions on a workspace scale which seems a
| while off for this project: https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-
| shell-extended-gestures
|
| I would love for them to progress enough so this extension is no
| longer necessary. Making great progress!
| solarkraft wrote:
| Does this make the animation follow the fingers? I think I
| tried this a while back and was disappointed :(
| rhodysurf wrote:
| Sadly, It does not. I have thought about how to do it and its
| a lot of work and time I don't currently have unfortunately.
| Part of the reason I hope this project continues to make
| something like this easier
| listennexttime wrote:
| Oh look, the goals and goalposts have moved again. Now apparently
| it's X11 Gestures (literally every patch, for functionality that
| _already exists in Wayland_ ). What a waste of donated money.
|
| Gestures, in Wayland or X11:
| https://github.com/Coffee2CodeNL/gebaar-libinput
| dastx wrote:
| I was looking for an update just a few days ago, but didn't find
| anything. No code, no blog posts nothing. So thank you for this,
| as I'd lost hope.
|
| This seems like great progress. I'll be donating a bit!
| ktm5j wrote:
| Cool! I've been using libinput-gestures for a while now as a
| hackish way to accomplish multitouch gestures. It's easy to use
| and works well if anyone wants this functionality without waiting
|
| https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures
| Fnoord wrote:
| I've tried this with an Apple Magic Trackpad 2 (the best stand-
| alone trackpad/touchpad available). It doesn't work smooth. It
| is very strict on the gestures (low fault tolerance?), unlike
| the very same device within a MBP (2015) on macOS.
|
| I wonder about this though. To me it seems this is very
| important to get to work for alternative Linux-based smartphone
| OSes such as SFOS, pmOS, UT, PureOS, etc etc.
| duhi88 wrote:
| Have you tried this with Apple's Magic Trackpad or al=ny other
| bluetooth trackpads?
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Thanks for the update! Curious, is there anything specific in
| terms of which platforms you're seeking testing help on (e.g.
| older macbooks, newer haptic touch macbooks, synaptics-based
| sensors)?
| p12tic wrote:
| Currently we're focusing on touchpad gestures (i.e. multi-
| finger touch swipe or pinch) as the poll [1] made in June
| indicated that touchpad gestures was the most wanted feature.
|
| There's plenty of work just implementing the basic handling of
| touchpad gestures, not even talking about any kind of polish.
| So at this moment we just assume that libinput handles touchpad
| gestures well and don't test at all. Once the basic parts are
| done we'll start polishing and this is when we'll test on as
| much hardware as possible.
| p12tic wrote:
| Whoops, I forgot the link to the results of the poll:
|
| [1]: https://bill.harding.blog/2020/06/22/linux-touchpad-
| project-...
| juancampa wrote:
| For my last couple of laptops I've used libinput first because
| everyone says it's the best option, but it always feels
| incredibly hard to perform small, precise movements. For example:
| try moving the mouse in a small circle (perhaps the size of the
| "Y" logo above). So both times I ended up switching to the old
| synaptics driver which seems to work better. I hope this project
| helps fix that so I'm sponsoring it
| codethief wrote:
| > For example: try moving the mouse in a small circle (perhaps
| the size of the "Y" logo above)
|
| Holy shit, you're right! I never noticed! There goes my plan to
| play old FPS games (like Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) on Linux
| without any major hassle...
| tsm wrote:
| For me it's just a touchpad issue; my USB optical mouse is
| completely fine
| codethief wrote:
| Mine apparently isn't :\
| acabal wrote:
| Agreed. I'd love to use Wayland for everyday use but the
| libinput touchpad drivers are impossible.
|
| Like you stated, the big problem is very fine movements just
| don't work in libinput. On X11/synaptics I can make movements
| as fine as rolling my fingertip in place on the touchpad, or
| drawing a minuscule circle, and it will pick it up. Libinput on
| the same touchpad does nothing, it's like it's stuck in
| molasses. And libinput has almost no configuration options so
| there's nothing I can even tweak.
|
| I really hope they address this soon, or I'll be stuck on X11
| forever!
|
| Edit: I'm using a Thinkpad P1 Gen2, a top-tier recent-gen
| workstation laptop, and this is a big enough problem where it's
| forcing me to use X11 on Ubuntu 20.04.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| I'm using Wayland and libinput on an X1 Carbon, which I'd
| expect to use a very comparable touchpad, and it works
| flawlessly. I easily can move the mouse by individual pixels
| by just rolling my finger, or throw it across the screen.
|
| You may want to experiment with your desktop environment's
| mouse settings, and if that doesn't help, you should consider
| providing a detailed report to the libinput folks and see if
| they can address it.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Which wayland environment are you using?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| gnome-shell 3.38
| p12tic wrote:
| Fixing issues like this is the primary goal of this project.
| Unfortunately there's a long way to go.
| kelnos wrote:
| Odd, I'm using libinput (Dell XPS 9380), and don't see the
| problems you describe. With my index finger on the touchpad,
| I can "roll" my finger a little in any direction (without
| actually sliding the finger), and the mouse moves a few
| pixels immediately. It's hard to get single-pixel accuracy,
| but 2-pixel accuracy is doable. I also have no trouble
| tracing the Y Combinator logo.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| I also have a dell xps but I'm on X11 right now due to
| teams screen sharing. I also have no problems doing exactly
| the same thing while my sisters MSI laptop on windows makes
| it almost impossible to move the pointer less than an cm on
| screen.
|
| I suspect this is more a hardware issue than software.
| arghwhat wrote:
| > In X11/synaptics I can make movements as fine as rolling my
| fingertip in place on the touchpad, or drawing a minuscule
| circle, and it will pick it up. Libinput on the same touchpad
| does nothing
|
| Just tried that on my Dell XPS on sway (wayland, thus
| libinput), and rolling the tip of my finger on the touchpad
| allows me to move the cursor in single-pixel increments on an
| unscaled 4k display. :/
|
| Maybe this is a libinput issue specific to your touchpad
| type?
| albertzeyer wrote:
| "They" (I assume you mean libinput devs) is just one single
| developer, namely Peter Hutterer.
|
| See this discussion: libinput's bus factor is 1,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23254871
| acabal wrote:
| "They" is really Red Hat, who are the ones pushing libinput
| and Wayland in the first place; and I imagine they would
| have no problem fixing this quickly if they hired more than
| one person to work on it.
| young_unixer wrote:
| And setting the flat acceleration profile on a touchpad doesn't
| really disable pointer acceleration +, even though it does if
| you use a mouse.
|
| + N=1, but it worked fine before libinput (using 'xset m 1 0').
| Barrin92 wrote:
| if you're using gnome, gnome tweaks has an option to turn
| acceleration off (just search for 'acceleration') and it
| seems to work for me.
| young_unixer wrote:
| That works for me if I use a mouse (in fact I'm currently
| using it), but not when I use a touchpad.
| lathiat wrote:
| I think this is an intentional driver setting to avoid false
| touches/moves on crappy hardware. You can likely tweak it but I
| think that's entirely the sort of thing the post author was
| trying to work on.
|
| I believe there is also a tweaks dB to set better values for
| known hardware.
| abrowne wrote:
| It's called hysteresis.
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| It's too bad we can't condense all the rhetoric "i use Apple <x>
| because it just works" into actual useful energy. Something like
| this may have been solved a long time ago.
|
| Glad to see movement about this. Was just considering converting
| my XPS 9560 into a full Linux machine next week (I will miss
| fingerprint sensor support, which brings up another point about
| just upgrading to a model that supports it). Going to use it as a
| testing ground for switching over my main rig to Linux and seeing
| progress like this is really encouraging that I'm making the
| right decision.
|
| I will gladly install these test packages and help out.
| Angeo34 wrote:
| I only read about GNOME what's with Plasma?
| solarkraft wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure if it's built into Plasma, but I remember
| having a (hacky, not with direct response) workspace switching
| gesture on Manjaro (Wayland, of course).
| p12tic wrote:
| Povilas from the linked blog post.
|
| Indeed this is a valid point, thanks. On the X server
| applications will get touchpad gestures regardless of whether
| one is running Plasma or GNOME. However, workspace-wide
| gestures are not implemented in either on X yet.
|
| On Wayland the display server is the one which handles
| workspace-wide gestures. Additionally, all events go through it
| to the applications. Perfect touchpad gesture support needs
| support in both. As far as I know Mutter (GNOME) handles both
| parts already and KWin (Plasma) currently handles neither.
|
| Implementing touchpad gestures on Plasma would fall within this
| initiative, I will most likely work on that at some point in
| the future. Please vote in the poll so that we know this is
| important to you.
| justinclift wrote:
| > Please vote in the poll so that we know this is important
| to you.
|
| The poll: :)
|
| https://www.gitclear.com/polls/linux_multitouch_apps
| shmerl wrote:
| What is the situation with Wacom drawing tablets under Wayland
| compositors? Do they work now?
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| Seems to work fine for me. On gnome it actually creates a
| second pointer separate pointer from the mouse one.
| curt15 wrote:
| They have worked under Gnome wayland for while. I don't know
| about KDE though.
| pkulak wrote:
| I read through the post, but still am not totally sure: will
| Wayland eventually be supported? What about wlroots vs mutter? Is
| that a distinction that needs to be made?
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| I've never been a fan of Linux on laptops as I feel its DE is
| just not there yet and prefer to stick to the terminal or the
| desktop, but I switched my laptop to Linux about six months ago
| to re-assess and ran into a number of big issues, the most
| unexpected of which was the poor state of basic touchpad support,
| not to mention multitouch input support - I genuinely thought it
| would be a solved problem by now, but I can't blame anyone but
| myself given that it's open source and anyone is free to
| contribute a fix (read on).
|
| IMHO the most egregious offender is libinput because everyone and
| their pet fish seem to be in a massive hurry to drop the
| proprietary synaptics driver and replace it with libinput; you're
| not allowed to ask for synaptics support because all distro and
| project maintainers will lecture you about "upgrading" to
| libinput which has "superior" touch and multitouch support...
| except libinput absolutely does not, even if it is theoretically
| architectured in a way that _would_ enable superior touch
| /multitouch support _someday_.
|
| The biggest problem is that the acceleration curves libinput uses
| are vastly inferior to those that ship out-of-the-box with other
| operating systems or the proprietary solutions from the
| manufacturers. When you read about the TrackPoint and the
| research that went into developing acceleration curves/profiles
| for input devices [0], it is hubris to think you can throw it all
| away and expect to still have a superior product.
|
| Anyway, long story short, if you're using a synaptics or
| synaptics-compatible trackpad, the old synaptics drivers have the
| best (by far) acceleration profiles and feel the most natural to
| use, but they are not supported by multitouch plugins for the
| desktop environments. That's not to say the drivers don't have
| multitouch support: they do, and they accurately report all
| motions, but only as raw events.
|
| I wrote this simple program to read the raw input from the
| synaptics driver and recognize two-, three-, four-, and five-
| finger tap and swipe gestures from the raw event stream generated
| by the synaptics driver per the kernel multi-touch protocol [1].
| I initially wrote it in an evening after studying the protocol to
| get just simple back/forward swipe navigations working with the
| only actually good touchpad drivers for Linux I could find (the
| synaptics one), and intended to clean it up before throwing it on
| GitHub for anyone else that might find it interesting but
| realized I wasn't sufficiently motivated to clean it up anytime
| soon so decided to just upload it as-is.
|
| sygesture [2] is written in rust and processes the raw MT
| protocol events generated by the trackpad in real-time to
| recognize multitouch gestures. Currently it spawns an `evtest`
| instance rather than opening the input device directly, that was
| a hack to not have to deal with translating the binary protocol
| but adds a dependency on the `evtest` utility (should be in your
| package manager). The path to device is also hard-coded in
| `main.rs` (and currently it only supports a single input device),
| but all that is separated from the actual parsing logic because I
| planned on making that modular from the start, but never got
| around to it. The mapping of gesture to action is also hard-coded
| in `main.rs` and isn't currently configurable. (It's all very
| easy to change even if you don't know rust, as all it does is
| spawn a program with certain arguments in response to each
| motion.) I'll throw an MIT license in the repo as soon as I get a
| chance.
|
| The utility is pretty bulletproof, even though the heuristic is
| fairly simple (the rationale behind the consensus algorithm is
| documented in the comments). It's extremely fast (don't have a
| reliable way to measure lag, but I'm extremely sensitive to it
| and don't detect any) and has low memory usage (CPU usage is
| basically zero except for the duration of a gesture, if you're
| polling at a high-enough frequency to pick up on that).
|
| Something not accounted for at all in the code is support for
| non-swipe gestures such as pinch-to-zoom and (has anyone ever
| used it?) "circle gesture" that can be apparently be used for
| weird things.
|
| [0]: https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=60
|
| [1]: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.18/input/multi-touch-
| prot...
|
| [2]: https://github.com/mqudsi/syngesture
| kilo_bravo_3 wrote:
| Is it still almost impossible to adjust the mouse and trackpad
| scroll speed/sensitivity, something that has been set by an easy-
| to-find slider in every operating system ever written since the
| invention of the scroll wheel, in Linux?
| auraham wrote:
| Has anyone tried the software in Ubuntu 20.04? I am sutck with an
| old version of Ubuntu.
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