- Latest update (December 2021): https://www.gitclear.com/blog/linux_touchpad_update_december...

- HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29555822

So far, pinch-to-zoom has been implemented in Firefox. (If you are using X11 instead of Wayland, then the environment variable MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 needs to be set.) Gestures for back/forward navigation have not been implemented yet (Firefox Bugzilla issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1539730).

The project aims to support gestures in other Linux apps, too. If you would like to help fund this project, the developer has a GitHub sponsor page here:

https://github.com/sponsors/gitclear

But thanks for the link, I'll check it out

If this was MacOS, I'd agree. But on Linux, it's a different hardware landscape. There are hundreds of trackpads that Linux is compatible with, but not every one of them is multitouch (or implements multitouch the same way). Gesture support on Linux has been a long time coming, but that's mostly because getting uniform trackpad support over thousands of laptops is just not a very fast process, whereas on MacOS, Apple can make certain assumptions about the hardware it's running.

This makes it a lot more likely that apps are going to recognize that signal so it works for every system. It’s the paradox of choice.

That's not true. On macOS (and also iOS), you subscribe to gesture recognizers (i.e. swipe gestures), not isolated events, which give you easy access to how users interact with macOS without having to analyze (and likely analyze incorrectly) low-level trackpad interaction.

You could always choose to look directly at events instead, but if you are trying to get the behavior of a widely-used gesture like swiping forward/back, you will get much more accuracy (and happiness from users, and less dev time) by just recognizing them at a high level, which is what Apple expects.

In Windows and Linux clicking the trackpad with 3 fingers causes a middle click, in MacOS this is not an option at all. Moreover, enabling it is apparently a project so difficult that the cheapest solution[0] I could find costs €8 just to add middle click functionality, nothing else.

[0]: https://middleclick.app/

Bit of a tangent, but it's always funny to me to discuss ChromeOS and Android as distinct from Linux distributions. I get that they're each practically as "Linux" as TiVo (and might not even be that forever, depending on how Fuscia evolves), but it actually might help avoid confusion if we started using the term GNU/Linux unironically in some contexts.

Termux folks keep hitting walls, because they refuse to acknowledge these are the only APIs they are allowed to call.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis

So when they make use of other Linux stuff that according to Google are private APIs, things don't go well.

As for ChromeOS, the kernel isn't exposed to userspace in any form, which are basically Webapps.

Running Linux applications on Chrome OS makes use of a secondary distribution in a VM, pretty much similar to how WSL 2 works on Windows.

So they might use the Linux kernel, yet they are far away from being distros that can easily run the GNU stuff.

It is not the first time I hear this, so this OSX feature must be truly addictive & productive.

I don’t really like the snide nature of your comment, people care a lot about things like trackpad functionalities. Objectively, unix has been lacking in this department.

In my case (and I suspect many others) a case of muscle memory, which can take a while to retrain, so you move to a new OS hoping you can keep the same motions you're used to and just get your work done. It's also important if you regularly have to use multiple OSes (as some tech support people have to do, and when you need to test on different OSes)