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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

The focus on multi-touch gestures is missing the forest for the trees.

If you look at the all of the next highest rated "features" they are not features but bugs. The reason that mac touchpads are so nice to use has _nothing_ to do with multitouch and everything to do with palm rejection, filtering, etc. It is a hard problem, analogous to and more difficult than writing multicopter flight control software. Having looked at the trackpad code, and fixing (in a very hacky way) some of the issues I was having, I have zero expectation that Linux laptops will get a mac like experience in the next couple years. Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political.

Trackpad software and cut and paste are the two largest detractors for desktop Linux.

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I don't have high hopes either. It takes a combination of hardware and software to produce a really good trackpad implementation. Apple has the advantage of total control over the hardware and years of research on the software. They bought FingerWorks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerWorks) in order to improve their touchscreen and trackpad products. Wayne Westerman spent years on the problem before getting acquired. I'd imagine many more person years of research has been invested at Apple.

That's not to say we can't do better and it's not worth making an effort. However, thinking Linux can match Apple in terms of trackpads is wishful thinking, IMHO.

The flip side is that Linux can leverage a lot of Apple's research into what works. We don't need to do usability studies, we already know what we want.

Using xinput set-prop on the touchpad to tune parameters doesn't really fix it.

I end up having to disable the touchpad and use the external mouse just to be able to type without accidental mouse jumping around.

#1 linux usability issue on laptops in my opinion.

Could you elaborate a bit on the technical vs. political aspect at play here?

I was kind of just assuming that the trackpad issue might have been, at least partly, because the hardware macs use for trackpads was special. Are you saying that's not the case?

Also, what about cut and paste??

> Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political.

Could you explain how/why? Is it about specializing in specific hardware/firmware?

Povilas from the linked blog here.

In open source often no one really cares about a suggested feature or even a submitted pull requests. It means additional work for the project maintainers - discussing design, reviewing code and handling of eventual bug fixes. Often the person who made a PR disappears leaving all future bugs the problem of the maintainer. So naturally project maintainers are risk averse and often say no to new features. Things end up not being implemented, not because it's technically difficult, or there's nobody willing to do the work, but because the incentives don't align.

The above opinion applies to open source in general as I've witnessed during the past decade. I'm not describing any projects that are related touchpad or input that I've been interacting with lately.

This post was delayed due to HN posting throttle, yay.

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Because of sub-system ownership and crossing boundaries between window managers and input handlers. Just getting folks to recognize the problem and agree on how and where it should get fixed is the major hurdle. When software is overly modularized it both prevents many classes of optimizations and it forces certain communication patterns. Conway's Law [1] in reverse, teams will be split across component boundaries and solving Desktop Linux issues will require a level of coordination I am not sure the community is up to.

Writing the if the statements isn't the issue, coordinating and agreeing on the problem is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

>Like all problems, it isn't a technical it is political.

Didn't the rest of this paragraph just explain how difficult a technical problem it is?

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