And sadly their audio stack too, down to drivers which are hard/impossible to get to work in recent machines.

A total waste because the latest Pixelbook Go is both really cheap and high quality.

The Pixelbook Go drops/skips samples all the time, and resamples everything to 48k for no reason. With all the dropped samples it's an unlistenable mess. Only works if you don't touch the machine at all while listening and have no background tabs. I don't think there's anything to be learned from this, except as counterexamples.

Oh, that's bad. I tried one and the machine looked fine. But it was only a 30 min test.

Is there something about the standard Linux input stack that makes it especially difficult to create a great touchpad experience?

Apple got it right a long time ago, ChromeOS is good, and Windows is too. What's different about Linux?

Apple supports only their own touchpads, ChromeOS also selected ones. Windows provides the great experience only for the Precision touchpads (i.e. not even to Apples under Bootcamp). Linux is expected to work with random crap, that even its vendors have given up upon.

That's the difference.

> Linux is expected to work with random crap, that even its vendors have given up upon.

What prevents Linux from picking ONE touchpad to optimize for? After all, both Lenovo and Dell are now shipping certain laptop models with official Linux support.

That brings you back to the days when you have to compare model numbers on every piece of equipment you buy to see if it is compatible, and discovering all to often that the compatible version was last year's model and the one you can buy isn't supported.

Casting a wide net is necessary if you don't want just a niche audience.

If one laptop vendor provides a particularly stellar experience, then it would gain in popularity and encourage others to compete.

A "jack of all trades, master of none" approach would only condemn everyone to mediocrity.

I think you're overestimating how much hardware manufacturers care about the Linux market.

All of this is just woefully overestimating how important the desktop market is to manufacturers at this point, Windows and Apple included.

Hardware manufacturers care a lot about the Linux market. But that Linux is Android, not desktop machines. Yes, the linux desktop segment is a tiny fragment of the market, but that market itself is shrinking and has been for almost a decade.

also, why create a linux driver when drivers for other OS's can have phone home/telemetry/postsales monetization/etc

You have to start somewhere.

I'd argue that mediocre on most hardware and excellent on a few particular models is better than mediocre everywhere.

And they both are upstreaming improvements for those supported products.

For example: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5....

Linux input still sucks with hardware that works great on other OS's.

That's exactly not the point.

The point was, that the other OSes picked specific hardware and they provide great experience only on that hand-picked hardware and nothing else. I specifically noted, that Apple touchpads do not work under Bootcamp as nicely as the Precision ones do, as an example.

Apple got it right because they built a stable api around it, and integrated all their applications with it.

Linux hasn't got it right because there is still no unified api, even if there was, all apps must implement it to be useful.

This is where OP push comes in. To make all of this possible through donations. You should read his older blog posts. They're worth a read.

I don't think so, I think it's mfgs skimping on the hardware. I have an xps 13 and it is incredibly precise. My old lenovo was ok. Not terrible but nothing like the xps. Which in my opinion beats a macbook pro.

> Apple got it right a long time ago, ChromeOS is good, and Windows is too

frankly even in 2020 I have yet to find one non-mac-hardware which is 50% as good as the apple touchpad experience