Guest post by “As the Linux desktop increases in popularity, the user interface experience has become increasingly important. For example, most laptops today have multitouch capabilities that have yet to be fully exposed and exploited in the free software ecosystem. Soon we will be carrying around multitouch tablets with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation. In order to provide a high-quality and rich experience we must fully exploit multitouch gestures. The uTouch stack developed by Canonical aims to provide a foundation for gestures on the Linux desktop.”
It’s a bit ridiculous that my iBook G4 can do multi-touch scrolling under Mac OS X Tiger, but my Asus F8Vr running Ubuntu 12.04 can’t.
Dual-finger scrolling has been working with various touchpads and Linux DEs for some time now. So in this specific case, I don’t think that this uTouch API would help you much, since what you most likely suffer from is a driver problem.
Or, to say it otherwise : if you have the proper driver, basic touchpad functionality should work. uTouch builds on top of that to do more fancy stuff.
Edited 2012-06-03 14:10 UTC
Alps and Synaptics dual finger scrolling work on Linux since 2005. Apple introduced multitouch touchpad in 2008 with the unibody MacBook pro.
Multitouch touchpad work on Ubuntu since 2010, but that implementation was rejected in favor of fixing XInput. This is a layer on top of that solution replacing the older one.
The two-finger scrolling option is greyed out in my touchpad settings. After all this time I was hoping it’d be available by default.
If you have a synaptics or alps touchpad with this option built in the hardware, then enable it anyway and it should work. I think Ubuntu think only multitouch touchpad can do 2 finger scrolling, it is not the case. Most touchpad can. Even if your can’t, you can still enable circular scrolling. It basically work like an old iPod touchwheel.
There are a good number companies with an awful lot of PAtents on Gestures. We have seen some of the spats already but if I were Canonical I’d be trading very carefully here.
If this stack becomes too popular then I fully expect a few of the patent holders to come a calling for their tolls.
The model used by the likes of Microsoft wrt Android is to get a fee per device. I am sure that they will want to keep that model going but quite how they will manage that is a puzzle when the OS that will contain the packages is given away for nowt.
Perhaps the new model that Canonical is going to try to use in order to make money will include the per system fees that these licensees will demand.
Canonical already license some packages (mp3) and do not ask a fee per user. I think they do for manufacturer.
Where are all those people claiming Canonical and Ubuntu contribute nothing for Linux and the open source community now?
Throwing a few stones doesnt suddenly make them great contributors. They need to do more and work with the upstream communities too to make sure that any good work done survives beyond canonical/Ubuntu.
uTouch is a hack that isnt suported by the wider community (which has been working on xinput 2/2.1/2.2) where the major developers think that uthouch is doing things in the wrong part of the stack.
This will likely remain Ubuntu only technology where everyone else in the FOSS community goes another way.
The big question here is where are gestures interpreted and at what level. should the X environment interpret them? the toolkit or the application?
The people working in X Inout believe that X is the wrong place as it wouldnt know enough about the applications and they provide inpout to feed up the layer (which then GTK3 or the application can interpret or ignore as needed).
Canonical/Ubuntu feel that X is the right place as for the few gestures, they should be consistent and also would appear quicker and with less work in the short term (though then when there is a right way that works well, this will create more work).
You probably hate having choice. Having to choose between Gnome, KDE, xfce etc. Having to choose between Gnome Shell or Unity. I like choices, I like it when people try to think outside the box, I like the fact I can choose between Git, Mercurial and others. I like the fact Fedora and Ubuntu decided to drop X and move to Wayland. Sometimes you’re left with a few or a lot of choices KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc. sometimes one dies and another survives VHS/Beta, but having that choice in the first place is a great thing. It allows different ideas to flurish and gives everyone a chance to do it in a different, even if eventually not a better way.Canonical is giving you more choices, whether you like those options or not (I hate unity) they’re still good to have.
“Soon we will be carrying around multitouch tablets with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation” I have yet to see this..
http://youtu.be/MADKdbN8nyY
I think he did not contest that it can be done, only that a significant amount of people will get one.
I have few more links for you, from related fields…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openmoko
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_Extended_Improved
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenZaurus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHR_(operating_system)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPIE_user_interface
And note how many people are carrying around PDAs or mobile phones running those environments, “with a traditional Linux desktop or similar foundation”!
(only, I must be very unlucky, I’ve never seen even one ;/ )
Yes, that is what “soon” means. In the future, not right now.