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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

I personally find the Linux desktop to be never as polished as macOS because it’s hacks over hacks.

One of the problems in inertia scrolling is that in Linux, it’s implemented in the driver level — which means that while scrolling by inertia, if I close the window, the window below will scroll. This is basically a hack because of backwards compatibility with the legacy APIs that only concern mouse events.

The proper way to do this (which is implemented in macOS) is to do this inertia scrolling in the GUI toolkit, which in macOS is AppKit. (macOS implements this in NSScrollView.)

Fixing this in Linux will be hard, since it needs coordinated effort between at least GTK, Qt, libinput, and the harware vendors — it’s an artifact of the fragmented ecosystem of Linux.

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At this moment I'm just generally frustrated with the state of desktop OSs in general. I used a Mac for a decade, and was generally happy with it, but not so happy with Apple's direction and recent poorer hardware. I recently installed Windows on a couple of machines, and that's just a horrific experience, and below the shinier surface, the OS is still as clunky as ever.

I've been putting my hope on Linux, but what the world really needs, is for someone to create a unified vision for a Linux/BSD/open source based OS and hardware that basically takes the Apple approach, or at least the approach Apple had 15 years ago.

It's amazing how little progress there has been in this field. If I had money and some expertise in this area, I'd start my own company making better laptops with a Unix-like OS that's not afraid of breaking compatibility with old Linux ideas like this that are holding us back. But that's never going to be more than a dream.

That's what Ubuntu was trying. Every time they stray from the norm, they get killed. The bigger problem is that we still depend on software that depends on the norm. (What was Mir and Unity?)

> making better laptops with a Unix-like OS that's not afraid of breaking compatibility with old Linux ideas

That's what OS X did, only for BSD rather than Linux.

That's why I loved OS X 15 years ago. But it's not open source, and it feels like it's getting less open with every new version. But worse is their hardware: I can't access it anymore. In a way, I think they peaked with the 2011 unibody design.

Fuchsia maybe? It’s already broken POSIX, and its entire stack is built with modern tech in mind.

True, but then they closed it up and boarded it off. It gets less open as we go, which is the opposite of what I want.

If these problems don’t get fixed promptly, systemd might have to start a project related to GUIs so that Linux can finally get a proper & consistent GUI environment.

(And I’m not joking — systemd gets criticized a lot about the monolithic design, but it’s design which ‘knows’ each other means that it can cooperate on big changes and features, provide consistency, etc...

SystemKit(ty)!1!! Finally! Meow!

So do qt apps in macOS have good inertia scrolling? Do gtk apps? Do java swing or whatever apps?

> it’s an artifact of the fragmented ecosystem of Linux

You mentioned literally two frameworks gtk and qt, which both use libinput, i.e. one thing. How is this fragmented?

I was saying that the inertia scrolling should be implemented in the toolkit level, instead of emitting bogus mouse events for ‘inertia’. Which means that GTKScrolledWindow (or whatever is NSScrollView’s eqivalent is) should implement it’s functionality, not in libinput.

I considered it as fragmented b.c. the reason it was implemented this way (instead of implementing in the toolkit) was mostly because one can’t coordinate big changes in at least three big libraries (vendor drivers + libinput + Qt/GTK) to achieve something relatively small (inertia scrolling) when Apple can just decide to ‘fix everything related’ if one decides to adopt a new feature.

Not that fragmentation is a necessarily bad thing, but it’s not great in these cases.

So in qt or gtk on macos it is implemented at the toolkit level?

I’m not quite understanding the question (probably due to my lack of English skills) but if you’re asking if it’s implemented in the macOS equivalent of Qt/GTK(which probably means AppKit), yes AFAIK it’s true.

Some apps on macOS are not written using AppKit but are cross platform apps which use either the QT or GTK toolkits even on macOS. The question is asking how inertia scrolling is handled on macOS for applications which use these toolkits instead of AppKit.

It’s not handled there at all. Qt likely uses NSScrolledView underneath, but Java/Swing and GTK feel foreign even if they look the same (which they don’t, with different levels of unsubtlety).

Badly, which is why cross-platform applications stand out like a sore thumb on MacOS

Well, I'm not sure (as I always erase GTK/Qt apps as soon as they become useless), but what I remember is that they do handle window changes (b.c. event propagation is handled in AppKit), but the inertia doesn't feel right. I think there are apps that do implement inertia, and there are also apps that don't implement inertia. Both feels wrong.

> Both feels wrong.

That was my question. So macOS has one blessed toolkit working nicely and everything else feeling "wrong". So this has nothing at all to do with being "fragmented" but simply says "apple has one good toolkit and lots of bad ones".

Well, I won’t call GTK/Qt as a macOS toolkit... but in Linux world, both are used similarly. I think that’s the difference.

> it’s implemented in the driver level

Not anymore, at least for any system that uses libinput (which I think is most of them at this point).

The reason libinput doesn't implement it is exactly for the reason you described, too.

Your information is very out of date.

The old synaptics driver worked as you describe (implementing kinetic scrolling at the driver level)

Libinput (which all modern distros switched to ages ago) does NOT implement kinetic scrolling at the driver level.

Instead libinput implements 'scroll sources' and it's up to the toolkits/clients to use that data to perform kinetic scrolling.

Both GTK and QT are exceptionally bad toolkits and are part of the reason the Linux Desktop never took off. Giving GUI toolkits responsibly for even more things is clearly a bad Idea. Also personally I like the fact that inertia scrolling works everywhere consistently the same way. Just think about the horrors everybody now implementing their own scrolling. Consequently the fact that Linux is "hacks over hacks" is a feature not a bug. People should stop assuming that copying Windows and Mac will somehow give Linux more popularity.

> Both GTK and QT are exceptionally bad toolkits

> Also personally I like the fact that inertia scrolling works everywhere consistently the same way.

> Just think about the horrors everybody now implementing their own scrolling.

Which should be a reason for advocating one toolkit that rules everywhere (maybe systemd-toolkit?), not a reason to have poor inertia scrolling experience that doesn’t work properly across different windows.

> Consequently the fact that Linux is "hacks over hacks" is a feature not a bug.

How can this is a feature, not a bug? Isn’t it technical debt?

I'm sure that the real issue with Linux is more a philosophical one, where certain aspects about freedom overlap with UX in a counter productive way, preventing devs from being very opinionated about important UX things.

As someone who tried using Digital Signature using ePass2003 token on Mac, I found the process impossible.

Meanwhile, it was few clicks on windows.

Atleast anything on ROC India/GST portal is impossible with Mac.

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