> This is not a "Linux" or "open source" problem; this is a problem of ignorance and/or insufficient interest on the part traditional (i.e. non-ChromeOS) distros and their users.
Heyas! I worked on a touch screen driver, related but obviously not the same thing.
So, consumer hardware, end to end control over every part. This gave us the chance to calibrate our driver to our specific hardware.
Originally myself and another engineer worked on making the touch screen driver work, and it was "ok". After awhile, we did a complete rewrite, and another couple amazing engineers joined in, and it became "pretty good." We had some fancy state machine for gesture detection, and the code was about as good as we were going to be to make it.
Then a team of experts came in and threw a bunch of math and ML at the problem to make the experience amazing. ML was used to fix up gestures so they actually worked properly, reduce latency (motion prediction!), and fix jitter, because touch screens are inherently analog devices and therefore noisy as heck.
Could the two of us on our own have made an amazing touch screen experience? Heck no. No matter how many hours we put into it, we were never going to be able to match what that team of dedicated engineers brought to the table.
And besides that, building an ML model up for the exact hardware we used is something that you just can't do when writing a generic driver that has to work all over the place.
There is a reason Apple gets a better UX out of a hardware stack they own end to end.