[Wayland-bugs] [Bug 103208] One-finger movement on touchpad registered as two-finger scrolling with edge exclusion zone is touched

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103208

--- Comment #15 from Peter Y. Chuang <peteryuchuang at gmail.com> ---
Couple of things:

1) Just because I express my dislike of a feature doesn't mean I belittle it,
or believe that no one ever uses it, or believe it's worthless. In fact, I
believe I have made myself quite clear that I am fine with keeping the feature
as long as we remedy the problem it causes. My key point is that I don't see
any obvious logic that can accommodate absolutely *everything*, so the question
will, at some point, become which feature you would rather sacrifice (see point
no. 4).

2) I also want to make clear that I dislike the feature not just as a user of
MacBook, which has arguably the best touchpad around, but as a user of other
touchpads as well, such as the one on XPS 13, and some older touchpads on some
$300 laptops from like 5 years ago. So I am not proposing these things just
because I think MacBook does them, but because I've used multiple touchpads and
haven't found the offending feature useful when it isn't causing problems. But
if other users find that feature useful, that's fine.

3) Of course I don't expect the feature to go away just because I don't like
it. I have used Linux for long enough to know that things don't work like this
here (or anywhere). 

4) If not everything can be accommodated, there will come a point in the future
where one will have to choose one over another. As touchpads improve, it will
be the old features that will have to go if they get in the way of
accommodating new features, IMHO. That's not avoidable in the long-run.

5) Now, it's not like I haven't thought about how to fix this *without* gutting
the feature. Here are **two other potential ways** I've come up since the last
comment:

A) ABS_MT_ORIENTATION of palm touches on the left edge should always be
positive, and those on the right should always be negative because of how the
hands are normally placed, no matter how large the contact areas are.
Incorporating orientation data may provide an extra check to identify real
palms within the edge zones, or perhaps even help do away from edge exclusion
zone altogether. Orientations of fingers tend to fluctuate around the edges in
my observation, but since users don't often use the edges for tracking, finger
detection at the edges does not have to be 100% perfect IMHO. Granted, this
will probably make two-finger scrolling (and
one-finger-moving-one-finger-stationary-scrolling) around the edges less
consistent than in the middle of the touchpad. We can test and debate whether
this decrease in consistency is worth it.

B) Call the one-finger-moving-one-finger-stationary-scrolling something else
altogether, because it's not *really* two-finger scrolling. For now, let's call
it Legacy Mode. Then create a new two-finger scrolling (or Experimental Mode
for now) with new checks, so that end users can actually *test* and help refine
the extra checks, and, if they don't like them, revert back to the Legacy Mode.

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