Reworked Touchpad Acceleration For Libinput: No Longer Terrible

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Reworked Touchpad Acceleration For Libinput: No Longer Terrible

Peter Hutterer has an early Christmas present for users of libinput on mobile devices with touchpads: much-improved touchpad acceleration...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...Touchpad-Accel

[uid313]

Does Dell make sure that the touchpad works great on the Dell XPS 13 developer laptop?
Does HP make sure that the touchpad works great on any of their laptops?
Have Apple contributed any patches for Macbook touchpad on Linux?

Too bad Synaptics doesn't seem to fix their stuff on Linux...

[schmidtbag]

I don't understand - isn't the Synaptics xorg driver open source? That driver has always worked fantastic for me; often better than Windows. Seems to me anything they needed could've been grabbed from that driver's source code.

Regardless, I'm glad to see progress in this. One of the primary reasons I haven't switched to Wayland is because of libinput's touchpad drivers.

[[email protected]]

I don't understand - isn't the Synaptics xorg driver open source? That driver has always worked fantastic for me; often better than Windows.

I remember installing Windows on a Dell laptop, and the driver you download from Dell actually made the touchpad worse than the basic PS/2 mouse emulation Windows do with touchpads without drivers. Just for kicks I loaded a live Ubuntu just to check and it worked like a charm.

Never underestimate a manufacturer capacity to make worse their own products.

[jaylittle]

Honestly the biggest pain point of using libinput on a t460s for me is the lack of acceleration settings for two finger scrolling. I could live with the current trackpad acceleration but the lack of scroll acceleration was a total deal breaker for me. So until they add that, I'm sticking with xorg and the synaptics driver.

[carewolf]

I remember installing Windows on a Dell laptop, and the driver you download from Dell actually made the touchpad worse than the basic PS/2 mouse emulation Windows do with touchpads without drivers. Just for kicks I loaded a live Ubuntu just to check and it worked like a charm.

Never underestimate a manufacturer capacity to make worse their own products.

Yep. All the touchpads are pretty much identical in precision. Some are just better configured by default. I also first discovered it by trying Windows on a laptop where it worked perfectly in Linux, but was utter shit by default in Windows. Pretty sure the Apple touchpads just has better default configuration. Is it somehow patent protected? Why do the other laptop manufacturer set their custom windows default to shit?

[Sloth]

I applied those patches. *Very* nice.

[Delgarde]

I don't understand - isn't the Synaptics xorg driver open source? That driver has always worked fantastic for me; often better than Windows. Seems to me anything they needed could've been grabbed from that driver's source code.

Open, yes - but from what I gather, very low quality code. There's a previous post by Peter on the subject, but the short version is that it's almost impossible to understand what the synaptics driver actually does, and that actually reusing the code would be impossible - hence, his efforts are on achieving a satisfactory effect, rather than on exactly reproducing synaptics algorithms.

[Shiba]

That's wonderful! Finally my touchpad doesn't have that "lag" feeling anymore!