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Comment by utku_karatas2 | Hacker News Reader

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Make trackpads great again! Bring on gestures by default.

- DESCRIPTION: Trackpad config situation is a mess. Pretty much every Ubuntu derivative has its own simplified (reads severely lacking) interface. What's worse is the gestures configuration. It's mostly done via some dude's one off scripts found on some forum post 2 years ago.

Give me a MacOS like experience on the trackpad (especially the 3/4 finger workspace switching) and I'd never look back on MacOS again.

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+1 to this. You currently have a lot of devs switching to the Dell XPS 13/15 (myself included) from the MacBook Pro line, wanting to give Ubuntu a go and speccing that particular laptop out with it.

Coming from mac, the most jarring experience of moving over is the trackpad. We know that for most trackpads, you can configure them to have similar behaviour for clicking (two finger right click, one finger click, no dedicated buttons), but it is hidden in config files etc. The option to emulate this experience should be baked into Ubuntu and made easy to access.

Palm rejection is also another big point with these trackpads. It doesn't work very well out of the box.

And we know that the hardware is more than capable enough since the XPS touchpads conform to Microsoft's "precision trackpad" spec.

I can't emphasize how annoying bad palm rejection is. I can't have my cursor randomly jumping across the screen and selecting windows that I don't want to type into (always seems to be at the worst time).

Try libinput. I configured my XPS 15 with libinput and it's been a blessing in disguise.

>Give me a MacOS like experience on the trackpad (especially the 3/4 finger workspace switching) and I'd never look back on MacOS again.

This. This. This.

This exists in Gnome 3.22 and up

You can achieve a primitive workspace switching scenario via libinput, xdotool and similar bandaids in any distro. What they boil down to is... once a certain 3/4 finger gesture threshold is crossed, it switches to the next/prev workspace in an instant. I'm not talking about that. The instant switch flashing the whole screen makes my head turn. It does not feel natural.

What I'm talking about it the exact MacOS behaviour, that is workspace switching occurs simultaneously while tracking my wrist motion, cancelable in the midst of the transition. That feels natural and allows you quick peeks.

ps. I guess you cannot have the MacOS way via the tools above because those tools should work hand in hand with the window manager, which they don't. Probably, this is a feature that would better be handled within the window manager itself.

yeah I get what youre saying for sure. Even Windows 10 has that baked in now!!!

The default for X is now the libinput driver. It's a miracle. My guess is that even if Canonical does no work in this area, the touchpad support will be much better.

I've been using it for over a year on MBP/Pixel2 and I've literally never once had a problem with palm detection.

Gesture support though is definitely still weak. Even GNOME that has 4-finger workspace switching has no configurability or hot corners...

Instead of putting too much effort in to Ubuntu phones they could team up with some manufacture and release Apple-like external touch pad with 100% integration with the system.

Yes. I tried to use Ubuntu on MacBook Air. Was missing smoothness if scrolling as on MacOS and support for resting thumb on trackpad.

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