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Comment by woleium | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of Linux on a mac, but until the touchpad software is up to the same standard as the apple version I'll make do with osx.

edit: I believe they are looking for donations.. I'll find a link when I have time.

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Linux has had Magic Trackpad support long predating it's support for Apple Silicon. On KDE/GNOME sessions in Wayland, you'll get 1:1 touchpad gestures for desktop management. Asahi should be using Wayland out of the box, so you'll be getting trackpad gestures along with the regular HID support.

Edit: here's what it looks like in action - https://youtu.be/aBEsxTVRsEo?t=100

It's also worth noting that Firefox ships with pinch-to-zoom and swipe-back gestures by default for Wayland now, too.

All of that is meaningless, if you move, and click, when typing.

I've not noticed any issues with palm-rejection when typing on Linux. If your trackpad does have issues, you can disable it while typing (but most Windows Precision trackpads work fine).

I'm mostly using the Magic Trackpad on my desktop though. It's very possible you might find a laptop with bad palm-rejection firmware, but I don't think that's an issue with these. Or Synaptics touchpads, in my experience.

I've had problems with palm rejection in MacOS on the M1 MBA; nowhere near as bad as on Dell machines running various flavors of Linux, but they are there.

Heh, interestingly I also noticed more problems on my 14" M1 MBP than I had on my previous mid-2014 13" MBP (or more specifically: any problems at all, because the touchpad on my previous MBP was pretty much perfect).

I suspect it's simply because of the bigger touchpad. Even if the "error rate" is the same as before, there are just more potential errors because of the bigger touchpad surface.

It less about the gestures, but about the general "feel" of the touchpad: latency, accuracy, acceleration, palm detection etc etc etc "just works" on macOS. I never had even close to the same experience on Windows, let alone on Linux. Maybe there's a mythical "Mac-like" Linux touchpad driver out there that doesn't suck, but if it isn't installed by default on a vanilla Ubuntu setup (or any other maintream distro) then it might just as well not exist.

Good news! It's in vanilla Ubuntu now.

The main holdup was Wayland - go get your Wintel machine and try booting up a Wayland session in KDE or GNOME. If your trackpad was manufactured with multitouch, chances are it will have gesture support. Any distro shipping GNOME 41-ish or Plasma >5.25 should have this by-default.

As for the feel... I'm gonna be honest, I don't notice any difference from my Mac. If anything, my Magic Trackpad has more gesture options on my KDE machine out-of-the-box. Don't knock it till you've tried it!

Erm well, I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 with Wayland and the touchpad is still crap :/

Worst thing is that I can't enable "tap to click" because the palm detection just doesn't work at all.

Why Wayland? You get libinput on both Wayland and X11 and X11 has gestures since 21.1

I have an external Magic Trackpad 2 running with Wayland/Ubuntu 22.04, and it works great.

There are some physical constants that you can't obtain short of measuring the touchpad and response in a metrology lab. Unless Apple releases their sensor thresholds and constants, reverse engineering can only approximate. Even now Flutter on iOS with the Cupertino theme only feels somewhat native.

I don’t think it needs a metrology lab - how about clean room reverse engineering of Apple’s driver(s) instead?

While my experience with Windows mirrors yours, I must say I've generally been quite fond with the feel of touchpads on Linux.

Both my spouse's laptop and mine were dramatically better in Linux compared to the Windowses they came with.

there was a magic touchpad driver for windows under bootcamp, worked quite well.

I use the Apple Magic Trackpad on my Linux desktop and it works very well out of the box. Works both over Bluetooth and over USB. The acceleration is different from macOS, but it isn't any worse. I can see that it's been supported for a long time in mainline Linux: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/drivers/hid/hi...

I just sponsor marcan on GitHub here: https://github.com/sponsors/marcan but there might be better ways. Not sure about touchpad support.

https://asahilinux.org/support/

Also don't forget to subscribe to Asahi Lina! https://www.youtube.com/c/AsahiLina

Strange hill to die on when full hardware accelerated graphics doesn't even work. Touchpad is the last problem

https://asahilinux.org/2022/12/gpu-drivers-now-in-asahi-linu...

> This is still an alpha driver

Yes, but it works. You can use it and it does acceleration on par for lower OpenGL versions.

A touchpad experience that doesn't get in the way is at least as important as good desktop rendering performance though.

You should try using MacOS with software-accelerated desktop rendering. Having seen both sides of the fence, having hardware acceleration for your desktop is a king's ransom relative to trackpad gestures.

Have any of you actually tried Asahi? Touchpad works flawlessly. A rust based, open source GPU driver is working since December and swiftly advances daily to a fully stable state.

I'm the opposite. I recently bought a MacBook pro and the latency of my mouse is so nauseating that I still use my old linux laptop for work.

Not sure if you really do mean latency, or the much more subjective-and-common complaint about the acceleration curve.

If you mean the latter, there are ways to customize that to be more like other desktop environments (sorry for not linking anything, currently on mobile and I don’t have time now to vet search results, but there are built in CLI settings which should be pretty easy to find).

Mostly commenting in case the above leads in a helpful direction, but if you actually mean latency of trackpad input apart from the acceleration curve, I’m wildly curious to hear more about what you’re experiencing and expecting otherwise!

Acceleration was my first thought as well. But I turned that off with some command I found online.

I'm not talking about the track pad (although that has quite a lot of latency as well). I'm talking about a mouse.

Is your mouse wireless?

I have no perceptible latency (and I game) on my M1 Pro MacBook with a wired mouse.

Yes it's wireless. The same mouse in windows or Linux is night and day though.

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