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> Yeah, this can be a little extreme, and I feel we can benefit from being a little more open to trying new things.

Sure, sometimes, when we have the time and surplus to deal with changes to things that already work well enough, and are not essential to doing our actual job.

That should be something you can opt in to.

Changing things for someone who's actually doing real work on top of the existing setup, is an undesired hurdle.

People are change-averse because they've been taught that change is costly, and they completely rationally ask "what's in it for me?". You want them to buy in to the change, you better give a good answer to that, one which is a more than negligible benefit in a few cases that the user may not care about. "Good enough" is good _enough_, it doesn't _need_ changes. Any change has to pay for its own retraining cost, in time and mental effort, otherwise it's a net negative for that user.

Being change-averse is the rational default behavior. Ignoring that, or even belittling it, is disrespecting your users.

I think the big issue is that the user doesn't have a choice in many cases. Windows obviously doesn't give the user a choice, they made the start menu much shittier and you had to live with it or go away. Popular distributions like Ubuntu also focus on one desktop environment, and it's often not easy to switch (it's possible of course, but at least when I tried it a long time ago just installing a different desktop wasn't enough).

Making it easier to choose allows for much more experimentation. I'm using Niri right now, which certainly isn't something you can just give users as a default.

> Windows obviously doesn't give the user a choice, they made the start menu much shittier and you had to live with it or go away

That's obviously wrong, you could install an alternative start menu and stay where you are

Here's another thing that's just completely ignored: touchpad as anything other than a mouse replacement. It's possible for a touchpad to allow things like pinch-to-zoom, but nobody's really doing that. You could even use it as a low res painting tablet.

Well, Apple is doing it. The touchpad experience on macbooks is really on another level than all other laptops and one of the main reasons that's keeping me there.

It's a gimmik

How is the primary way of interacting with your computer being good a gimmick?

I try to use my partner’s windows laptop and it’s borderline unusable for me. She only almost uses it with a mouse plugged in. Meanwhile I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone plug in a mouse to a MacBook that wasn’t docked to a monitor and keyboard.

Pinch to zoom and two finger scrolling work well for me in most Windows apps. Apple has a few touchoad gestures that I don't believe have equivalents elsewhere, but they would be pretty neat.

The main issue with going beyond the mouse is that it involves changes across the event handling stack. For track pads, you have to build multi-touch infrastructure up ro a point and then there is a decision: what are gestures that are handled at a desktop level? What are gestures that get converted into semantically similar events (e.g. tap->LMB click)? What gets passed through as multi-touch? This ends up touching a lot of parts of the desktop software stack and the amount of required buy in to get this done on Linux seems massive.

Then change the stack. We can't be stuck on obsolete inefficient mental models. We are programmers, we can change software to fit new requirements. We already found ways to deliver keyboard input to the focused window.

Pinch-to-zoom is handled by libinput, and exposed to gtk apps. Works fine in firefox. Works in GtkWebkit views. works in Loupe the image viewer. works in Gnome Maps. Even works in Emacs, ffs.

Are you on X or smth?

I'm actually on a desktop without a touchpad.

I don't understand your initial comment at all, then. You want touchpads to have features they already have, which you haven't tried, because you don't have a touchpad?..

Or was there a different meaning?

You understand that I can understand that parts of the system I don't personally use right now have issues right? Like I don't use systemd, because it sucks, but I can still say systemd sucks.

I have no idea why you've been downvoted? Touchpad pinch-to-zoom has worked out of the box for years now (and also works fine on X11, also).

I guess one problem is that the capability of touchpads really varies. Not all of them support recognizing multiple touch points for example.

And the original UX issue is much easier solved by bringing a mouse with your laptop.

> And the original UX issue is much easier solved by bringing a mouse with your laptop.

... or using an Apple laptop. The one thing they haven't broken yet is that their machines are perfectly usable without a mouse.

Of course, the argument is weakening with every recent OS release, since they try to make it useless in other ways.

People from outside the tech community also do not like things changing, they just do not have the same choices or have the same voice. I have come across people who use old versions of Windows because they do not like UI changes, but they cannot do it forever, and they not have another choice.

I remember a lot of systems were still using DOS into the XP era, because it worked so why change it?

The internet is what changed this - you have to keep up with the other systems you're communicating with.