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Comment by p12tic | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm the developer behind this effort. I can answer any questions you have.

> Bill believes that the biggest opportunity to improve Linux touchpads is to adapt their acceleration curve to better match the profile of a macOS touchpad. How do you feel about the acceleration and precision that your Linux touchpad offers?

Is this work only going to be for touchpads? I personally hate the X11 curves with mice and vastly prefer Apple’s. It seems to be hard coded last I checked and not easily modifiable (there are two parameters now but it’s still a very different curve). If trackpad curves also benefited mice (particularly those of us who use Apple’s Magic Mouse on Linux), that’d be amazing!

Thank you for your efforts to improve these ergonomics — it’s thankless and hard work but benefits many.

For now we only focus on touchpads. I think that if we're successful in delivering touchpad improvements then we will gain credibility and trust that could be useful when working on other input devices.

Just want to echo the above sentiment—mouse-based acceleration curves are in need of just as much love as touch pads, and I'd love to see both!

Just want to thank the developers behind this and joined as GitHub sponsor. Happy to see this also enters the Qt framework.

Yes incredible what they're getting done with a shoestring budget.

From the announcement "The number of people keeping this project going is tiny (currently just 121 supporters), but this small group of passionate Linux users are creating meaningful forward progress to improve the touchpad ecosystem for hundreds of thousands of Linux touchpad users. For those who don't want to rely on a future beholden to Apple, we hope that you'll consider supporting us? We could be getting more done if we had 250 supporters. "

Thanks for your work on this!

Your report says Firefox gestures are working on Wayland, and two finger swiping left/right appears to be configured in the Firefox prefs to go back/forward in history:

  browser.gesture.swipe.left = Browser:BackOrBackDuplicate 
  browser.gesture.swipe.right = Browser:ForwardOrForwardDuplicate

However, Firefox doesn't respond to these gestures. Do you know what's up with that? (I'm on Fedora 35, if that's relevant.) Two finger scrolling up/down works just fine.

Interesting, this feature may only be for touchscreens because two-finger swipes are registered as scrolls on Wayland. This will indeed need further work.

What does work though is two-finger pinch gesture to zoom in/out of a web page.

I dug up the Mozilla bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539730

IIRC these weren't for two finger swipes at least on macOS (which is the only place I saw this working). I think these were handling 3-finger swipes. Unfortunately now GNOME chomps 3-finger swipes so IDK if that is where the problem is (I guess someone without GNOME can try and see).

How does this differ from what Fedora is shipping in Gnome? Touchpad gestures, sans acceleration are flawless.

Fedora and Gnome is only one desktop environment and one widget toolkit. For example, Qt-based apps didn't have touchpad gestures at all anywhere until my work on Wayland gestures landed this year.

It is true though that if one limits oneself to Wayland and only to Gtk-based applications that touchpad gestures mostly worked before. We now switched focus to adding touchpad gesture support to more applications, so there will be measurable progress even for this case too.

Is there binaries I can install or do I need to compile something? I have no idea where the code is.

In short - there are no binaries and it's relatively hard to compile these manually, so I recommend to wait until the Linux distributions picks these projects up. This usually takes around 6 to 12 months.

Holy cow, that was a LOL from hell. Are you serious? 6-12 months is the biggest tease. "Here's this really cool thing, but maybe, if you're lucky, you'll be able to use it in a year or so." That's the quarter super glued to the floor kind of frustrating.

It's not super glued to the floor. It's on a train, on its way to your station. How far away your station is from the train entirely depends on the length of the release cycle of your Linux distribution, and is completely outwith the control of this developer. That's how Linux distros work. If you want it sooner you can always use a rolling release, such as Manjaro.

The new X server is already in Debian experimental [0], with a bit of luck it trickles down to unstable just in time for Ubuntu to pick it up for the 22.04 release.

If you are running Arch you already have it [1].

[0] https://packages.debian.org/experimental/xorg-server-source [1] https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/xorg-server/

What versions of the mentioned packages is this feature included in? I.e. what should I be looking for in my distro updates?

Touchpad gesture implementation in X server has been released in version 21.1

Wayland touchpad gesture implementation in Qt widget framework has been released in version 6.2.0

X11 touchpad gesture implementation in Gtk widget framework has been released in version 4.5.0

X11 touchpad gesture implementation it Qt widget framework will be released in version 6.3.0 (March 2022)

Touchpad gesture implementation for XWayland will be released in version 22.1 (early 2022)

I'm curious - what is needed for LibreOffice to work?

It uses a custom widget toolkit. Adding touchpad gesture support is certainly doable, but it would benefit only single application, so we haven't prioritized that so far.

I work on the VCL component of LibreOffice. Where are the technical docs on how gestures work?

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