Making the Best of MacBook Air Touchpad on Ubuntu

I'm happy enough with the libinput driver that I don't want to go building a whole custom driver from source, but I really liked the "pixel-perfect scrolling in Firefox" tip at the end.

Thank you for posting this! I recently installed linux on my MacBook Air and the biggest thing I missed from macOS was how nice the trackpad was, especially scroll inertia and 3-finger drag. Now I'm completely happy with my decision to switch.

Really happy to see I'm not the only one using Ubuntu on a MacBook air! If anyone is looking for the most customizable Ubuntu desktop (and my favorite window manager since 2010), I highly recommend compiz!

> sudo apt-get install gnome-session-flashback compiz compiz-core compiz-plugins compiz-plugins-default compiz-plugins-extra compiz-plugins-main compiz-plugins-main-default compiz-plugins-main-dev compizconfig-settings-manager

You'll log out of GNOME, click the settings cog, and select Flashback-Compiz. Then you'll see a wonderfully clean desktop, and then you can go into Applications -> Administration -> Compiz Config Settings, and you'll have complete and total control over your desktop!

This video is kind of gaudy but it might help explain what's possible: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=Jb7kFWTj28g MINUS the horrible sidebar, that will be replaced with an upper toolbar similar to Mac.

I actually have a proper write-up for how to get the Ubuntu Desktop you deserve using compiz, but it's very much a WIP unfortunately.

This is cool, but this doesn't really work when you are running a wayland session. Also the default libinput driver on wayland already catches multitouch events with macbook without issues. The window manager just has to handle them.

I have done some exploring to get better touchpad gestures with gnome on wayland: https://github.com/mpiannucci/gnome-shell-extended-gestures . Its an incomplete project that I work on slowly when I get the time between my job and freelancing, but slowly coming along and meets my personal needs fine.