Linux Notebooks to Get Touch Gesture Support

Touch interfaces are becoming an increasingly popular way of interacting with devices. It all started with the iPhone, more or less, but today, plenty of laptops support gestures through the touchpad. Apple notebooks have had multi-touch and gesture support for a while now, and Windows users also get to enjoy the feature. For Linux though, as always, this was problematic. Luckily, there is one glimmer of hope, Synaptics, the manufacturer of most touchpads found in laptops, has made the Synaptics Gesture Suite for Linux (SGS-L) available for OEMs.

“The Synaptics Gesture Suite for Linux enables our OEMs to leverage a broad range of gesture capabilities across Linux operating systems, and offers extensibility into new Linux flavors such as Google Chrome OS and additional support for touch-enabled remote control devices,” Ted Theocheung, head of Synaptics PC and digital home products and ecosystem, said in the press release.

“SGS ensures optimized interoperability of gestures, minimal gesture interpretations errors, and proven usability performance across the widest range of TouchPad sizes from small remote controls and netbooks to large powerhouse notebook PCs, as well as customization capabilities to OEMs’ exacting specifications,” he added.
 
That sounds like great news and it is, to a degree. It will enable manufacturers who build Linux-powered notebooks to implement multi-touch support out of the box. For any other operating system, this would be enough. But the fact is, very few people buy a notebook with Linux pre-installed, most Linux enthusiasts install it by themselves.

Synaptics says several popular Linux distributions will be supported including Fedora, Millos Linpus, Red Flag, SLED 11 (SuSE), Ubuntu, and Xandros. However, it’s unclear whether the packages will be freely available in the distributions’ repositories. At this point, it doesn’t look like they will, as the SGS-L is being offered to OEMs that acquired one of Synaptics’ products.

This enables OEMs to customize the software to their exact specifications, but not making it available to anyone else doesn’t really make sense. Anyone who would need the suite would have to own a Synaptics touchpad and it’s not like you can get one without paying for it. The sale was already made, so there is little point for this arbitrary limitation. It goes without saying that there is no source code available either.