Libinput 1.10 Is On The Way To Remove Touchpad Hysteresis

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Libinput 1.10 Is On The Way To Remove Touchpad Hysteresis

Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has announced the first release candidate of libinput 1.10 today, which isn't a big feature release but rather incorporates a few new features with many bug fixes for this input handling library used by X.Org and Wayland systems...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Libinput-1.10-RC1

[andrebrait]

He's a great guy too, at least from my experience reporting bugs to him and stuff.

Libinput still has some shortcomings compared to the current synaptics drivers in X, but I can't test it right now (running Ubuntu 16.04 here). I hope he gets that sorted out. The sensitivity is still weird, as of Ubuntu 17.10.

[dos1]

Yeah, Peter seems very nice, his blog posts are wonderful. Sadly, unless you don't mind the quality of interaction, the libinput touchpad handling is still a nightmare.

Not only sensitivity and acceleration is weird, but its multifinger scrolling support is really bad. It's very common for it to not register that you've placed second finger and to continue to move the cursor when you want to scroll. Also, the kinetic scrolling -synaptics implements and libinput lacks really adds a lot to the experience (but yeah, I know, it's really hacky how it works there, so I kinda understand why it's not there - I really miss it nevertheless).

On my Yoga, going from -synaptics driver to -libinput (or Wayland) means degrading my touchpad (Synaptics TM3066-002) from one of the best touchpad experiences I've ever used (my girlfriend has MBP, its touchpad is very praised around the web and I don't really feel the difference) to something really meh.

However, what's interesting - I've briefly had Windows 10 on this machine and even though I've had the Synaptics driver with its control panel installed, the touchpad there was almost as bad as libinput's, with almost no useful configuration options.

I guess modern touchpads are usually pretty comparable to each other hardware-wise. It's just software that differs - xf86-driver-synaptics and macOS do it very well, while libinput and Windows suck.

I hope libinput steps up - not only because I'd eventually want to switch to Wayland without degrading my touchpad quality, but also due to its generic multitouch gestures capabilities.

[Tomin]

Not only sensitivity and acceleration is weird, but its multifinger scrolling support is really bad. It's very common for it to not register that you've placed second finger and to continue to move the cursor when you want to scroll.

I think this touchpad acceleration thing is a typical complaint about libinput. It can be adjusted, but defaults are always defaults. I'm not sure what would be the best default though.

Also, the kinetic scrolling -synaptics implements and libinput lacks really adds a lot to the experience (but yeah, I know, it's really hacky how it works there, so I kinda understand why it's not there - I really miss it nevertheless).

I wonder if this is something that should be implemented in libinput or if it should be implemented in the user applications.

[dos1]

I wonder if this is something that should be implemented in libinput or if it should be implemented in the user applications.

I thought about it a bit. I think it should be either libinput or Wayland compositor. The last thing you want is to have your touchpad behave differently in different apps just because they use different toolkits.

Kinetic scrolling is like a mouse wheel without much friction and it's pretty natural to me that it behaves that way when window focus switches etc. so the way synaptics driver does it never bothered me at all. However, if we would really want to get rid of this hacky behaviour, the compositor should be perfectly capable to dispatch correct events in all cases.

[stibium]

Yeah, Peter seems very nice, his blog posts are wonderful. Sadly, unless you don't mind the quality of interaction, the libinput touchpad handling is still a nightmare.

Not only sensitivity and acceleration is weird, but its multifinger scrolling support is really bad. It's very common for it to not register that you've placed second finger and to continue to move the cursor when you want to scroll. Also, the kinetic scrolling -synaptics implements and libinput lacks really adds a lot to the experience (but yeah, I know, it's really hacky how it works there, so I kinda understand why it's not there - I really miss it nevertheless).

On my Yoga, going from -synaptics driver to -libinput (or Wayland) means degrading my touchpad (Synaptics TM3066-002) from one of the best touchpad experiences I've ever used (my girlfriend has MBP, its touchpad is very praised around the web and I don't really feel the difference) to something really meh.

However, what's interesting - I've briefly had Windows 10 on this machine and even though I've had the Synaptics driver with its control panel installed, the touchpad there was almost as bad as libinput's, with almost no useful configuration options.

I guess modern touchpads are usually pretty comparable to each other hardware-wise. It's just software that differs - xf86-driver-synaptics and macOS do it very well, while libinput and Windows suck.

I hope libinput steps up - not only because I'd eventually want to switch to Wayland without degrading my touchpad quality, but also due to its generic multitouch gestures capabilities.

In OSX the MBP is hands-down the best touchpad in anything you can get. Mostly owing to using a different bus than USB. (SPI I believe), but the tpad controller firmware has always been supreme. However, I've been using Ubuntu for a while on my MBP and it's so bad I'm planning on going back to OSX. It's just not very responsive, and I get lots of false inputs switching between one and two fingers. (Directories randomly get dragged into other ones instead of scrolling) The most frustrating is that the X and Y axes aren't picked up right. Like, if you try to trace a circle you end up with a square with rounded corners. It's just not a pleasant experience coming from OSX.