Ubuntu Tried Adding Synaptics Support Back To GNOME's Mutter

[OneBitUser]

To be honest, I said that sarcastically but actually I find them a good input method. It is surprisingly accurate. And if I wasn't so settled on years of touchpad use, the trackpoint definitely would be a viable mouse substitute for me.

You guys really need to try a trackball... I use two Elecom trackballs (a wired one for my Linux desktop, and a wireless for my work laptop on Win10).
The wireless one is a great asset on the move: when I work or play during a train ride I can just put the trackball on my Thinkpad's palmrest or trouchpad (which I have disabled).

[linuxgeex]

I have used a touchpad exclusively for years and years and I think it's much faster than mouse for keyboard-heavy users. I use keyboard shortcuts + special keys for most of my navigation. I can just leave my arms and wrists in basically the same place to change from keyboard to pointer control. I do use touchpad heavily for webpages, image editing and that stuff but not for much anything else.

I agree with this sentiment.

As a programmer, I don't move my cursor very randomly. Most of my changes are iterative and local. A touchpad is quick because I don't have to move my right wrist more than 1.5" to use it.

On the other hand, when I do my taxes I use a mouse. When I play FPS games, I use a mouse. Any time that you need to make rapid-paced random and accurate selections, a mouse is going to win hands down, even over a touchscreen.

My girlfriend loves a trackball. Her wrist doesn't get tired when she uses it. But I have wrist damage from 4 years of treeplanting in my 20's and a trackball gives me symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome in short order due to the lateral forces required to move the ball with my thumb. My Logitech MX Master supports my wrist at an ergonomic height and angle so I have no issues ever. If you have ever had carpal tunnel, get an MX Master, you will be pleased.

[molecule-eye]

Why don't they try contributing to making libinput better instead?

[OneBitUser]

My girlfriend loves a trackball. Her wrist doesn't get tired when she uses it. But I have wrist damage from 4 years of treeplanting in my 20's and a trackball gives me symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome in short order due to the lateral forces required to move the ball with my thumb. My Logitech MX Master supports my wrist at an ergonomic height and angle so I have no issues ever. If you have ever had carpal tunnel, get an MX Master, you will be pleased.

Funnily, trackballs were the perfect cure for my early CTS symptoms, which just goes to show you that one size does definitely not fit all!
I'm currently thinking of getting a wireless Elecom HUGE trackball... not exactly portable, but it does include it's own wrist rest and a big central ball you can operate with your fingers instead of your thumb. Unfortunately it is rather hard to recommend for a tryout, considering its price and availability. But maybe you can pawn it off on your girlfriend if you don't like it....

[linuxgeex]

Why don't they try contributing to making libinput better instead?

Sometimes APIs get in the way of doing something well.

A touchpad has several characteristics that are discarded between the driver and the generated input events. For example, pressure sensitivity, touch distance, touch diameter. These things are usually interpreted in the driver and converted to conventional mouse events but in reality a lot of really valuable information is lost.

I'd love it if The Gimp could use the pressure sensitivity of my Synaptics pad to vary draw characteristics for different drawing tools. It would be nice if some tools only activated at a minimum pressure level, ie the selection tool could drag its selection box while I drag on the pad, and lock when I press harder, instead of me having to pick my finger up and tap, which results in a location change and then I have to fine tune the selection after the fact. It would be great if when I am pasting it could use the pressure of my tap to set the opacity that it pastes at, so that a paste tool would become a great drawing tool. It would be great if the cursor would track when my finger doesn't even touch the pad but is near enough that it still detects the position. It would be great if the diameter/shape of my touch could affect the brush shape. For any of that to work, Gimp needs the freedom to interpret the data from the touchpad before it ever gets to libinput, or there needs to be some extra data channel added to libinput to supply that data as something other than the current notion of HID input events.

Anyhow, to handle a touchpad well requires a lot of tuning and feedback by the app that's using it. That includes acting as a well-behaved HID pointer input. Separating the preferences so far from the code responsible for actually determining the device behaviour is what has led to Linux desktops having such terrible touchpad support. The system preferences don't understand how a touchpad really works (because so much is lost between the driver and the data that it sees) and instead just apply some scaling and hysteresis effects to the derived pointer data, which results in amplifying errors or reducing responsiveness, or both. I totally do not blame the Canonical maintainers for trying to get back the user experience they had when there was less of a disconnect between the preferences and the device. They're just trying to avoid getting hate mail "Why does my touchpad work so much worse on Linux than Windows?!"