Bringing Linux touchpads up to MacBook level
Summary
Bill Harding documents measurements and libinput adjustments for more natural acceleration, gestures and inertia on Linux touchpads. The work focused on libinput. Touchpad quality depends on firmware, driver and desktop environment.
Ideas
- Raw events distinguish finger movement from the displayed pointer movement.
- Acceleration curves translate speed into distance on screen.
- Gesture recognition needs consistent multi-finger events.
- libinput unifies input behaviour across many devices.
Insights
- Good input feels direct even though it uses careful filtering.
- Subjective quality of use can be made measurable by recording events.
- Hardware diversity makes uniform defaults for desktop Linux harder.
Recommendations
- Record raw events before changing acceleration values.
- Test settings with several devices and typical gestures.
References
Links to the original source and the Web Archive open in a new tab.