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Comment by ghostpepper | Hacker News Reader

Count me among those who agree there is a vast gulf. Another thing I've noticed recently is that on my X1 carbon (7th gen) there is a small but noticeably distance when I first start dragging a finger before the cursor moves that does not exist on a Mac trackpad with MacOS.

I also wonder what the experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad. Is it closer to the experience on MacOS or closer to the experience with Linux on commodity hardware? If the latter, maybe it makes sense to improve that first.

Maybe not though, if the synergy between hardware and software is the "secret sauce" that's missing then maybe optimizing the mac trackpad for Linux would be wasted effort.

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Honestly, I don't think this is as difficult of a problem as we think. Has anybody tried scrolling in Windows UWP/Modern/RT apps with a precision touchpad? It's just as glorious. In fact, I've read many accounts of people who use pre-Chromium Edge just for the scrolling experience. Microsoft also ported this scrolling algorithm/profile to Chromium Edge, even if it's slightly less responsive (probably limited by win32)

If you don't like the scrolling in UWP it probably has more to do with it's acceleration graph than its capability. That, and macOS seem to just make their UI animations way smoother than anything I've seen on Windows and Linux. The Windows desktop switching and "expose" animation kills me every time it janks.

I don't know what's stopping Microsoft from porting this scrolling behavior to Win32, and to be fair it seem like they tried (scrolling in Explorer is noticeably different on a precision touchpad even though not as smooth) but probably they're held back by backward compatibility or that it's too much of an effort to make that pig fly.

I wouldn’t conflate someone else doing something you like with difficulty.

well most of the posts here somewhat suggests this is a difficult problem that only Apple has the resources and desire to solve

Microsoft is not lacking in resources or motivation. It’s still a hard problem regardless.

My understanding about the smoothness of the animations in MacOS is that the animations interpolate along the gesture, versus being triggered only when the gesture is considered complete and thus registered.

Windows does that too, at least for desktop switching. It's above that actually, the way Apple implemented animations in general using Core Animations looks much smoother than Windows or Gnome in my experience.

To satisfy your curiosity about the performance of the MacBook Pro's touchpad in Linux... it's not great, especially if you just recently used it in OS X.

I haven't ran Linux on another machine in anger for a long time so I can't compare the between laptops.

I have run Linux on my old MBP 2015 though, and the trackpad is usable but as soon as you boot macOS again you realise how crap it was on Linux. Tweaking accels/speeds can bridge the gap a little but it's still not nearly as good.

Experience report and speculation-

I have used Linux (fedora-xfce) inside VMWare Fusion on Mac laptops on a daily basis for at least the last decade, and also have run Linux on Thinkpad and System76 hardware from time to time.

In general I find the trackpad experience of Linux-inside-VMWare-on-Mac to be basically identical to that directly on Mac, and much (much) better than either Linux on Thinkpad or on System 76.

There is some oddness in the VMWare setup- in the VMWare parent process, over time, RAM usage grows, and a slight lag is introduced into the UI experience inside Linux (both trackpad and keyboard).

When this gets too noticeable, I kill the VMWare parent (which does not kill the actual VMs), then restart it. The lag is eliminated, the memory leak is cleaned up, and the child VMs are not impacted.

I imagine the abstracted event flow to be:

HW -> Mac driver -> VMWare user space UI loop -> Linux generic driver -> Linux userspace

while the Linux only event flow would be

HW -> Linux driver -> Linux userspace

While there is some jankiness in VMWare's delivery of events to the generic Linux driver that the kernel uses for the VMWare "hardware", the work happening in the Mac driver is the magic that delivers great experience.

LOL ridiculous downvote.

I few months ago I tried really hard to get smooth-scrolling on a Macbook pro running Windows/Linux vms. I was testing against VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and native boot. I never got a satisfying result. Windows on hardware with specific software, like Edge, was the only environment I could get smooth scrolling. There was a lot of "it seems smooth to me" which made it harder to figure out if it was the hardware, VM, OS, or application (there are a lot of Firefox advanced settings to make it "Mac-like"--which aren't).

As for mouse movement, like you're saying it's pretty good in a VM when it's HW -> macOS -> sending X and Y values to the VM and guest OS.

Windows on hardware, even using Apple's drivers, is a bit "off." I lose drags, moving around is odd, and I feel like I have to be more deliberate with clicking. I never seem to have those issues when using Windows inside a VM.

> there is a small but noticeably distance when I first start dragging a finger before the cursor moves

This might be https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/34... or https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/28.... The latter is easy to fix by commenting out hysteresis activation if you know your hardware doesn't need hysteresis. A proper fix would be to improve the wobble detection but neither me nor Peter apparently have time to work on that. :-/

Ran Linux on a MBP and had about the same experience as my thinkpad. It was when I reinstalled MacOS that I had a serious user shock. After configuring there was still a noticeable quality of life disparity between the two and I spent the next couple months training myself to deal with it while pining for Linux.

This is most likely a palm detection feature: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/blob/mast...

Very annoying "feature" and the worst part is that it can not be disabled nor there are any plans on putting it behind a toggle flag, see https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/19...

Luckily it can easily be patched on your own.

I run Linux on one MBP and MacOS on another and I have a dissenting opinion that the MBP trackpad on Linux actually behaves extremely well. I have an X1 too and find the trackpad horrible in comparison.

I plug my magic trackpad 2 into my first-gen x1 carbon, and it works remarkably well for scrolling, clicking, getting around.

I miss some of the multi-touch features (three-finger-swipe-up) but it's pretty much identical excepting those. When I close the lid and plug in to a monitor, you can't tell much of a difference.

Fwiw, the latest fedora manages to make the carbon's trackpad feel as good as a macbook: Might be worth trying it out.

I want to believe that anything available in Fedora can be shoehorned into Arch but I suppose the trick is figuring out which component(s) is/are responsible.

Try fusuma (https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma) to get 3/4 fingers swipe and pinch

>> experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad

I ran Lubuntu on a 2012 macbook pro for a couple years and it was much closer to an "Apple" experience compared to my current setup of Pop_OS on a P52S Thinkpad.

I can speak for the mac trackpad on windows via bootcamp, and the experience is noticeably worse. Even scrolling feels like I stepped into a time machine to 15 years ago.

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