Ah the touchscreen ─ that piece of hardware that promises to finally
strip humanity of an interface very much long in the tooth. I’m talking
about the mouse. It’s that piece of technology that is being threatened
with extinction, thanks to the touchscreen. And with good reason. Once
you’ve used the touchscreen, you fully understand that they are, in
fact, a much-needed breath of fresh air.
But in Linux-land, all isn’t exactly rosy. Once you get your hands on a supported device (such as the fantastic
System76 Sable Touch
running Ubuntu 14.10), you’ll find that not everything works as you’d
expect. Sure there are some handy three and four finger multi-touch
gestures that work out of the box, but the go-to gestures (such as right
mouse click and Firefox scrolling) simply don’t work.
The good news, getting those very necessary gestures to
work isn’t all that challenging. It does, however, require the
installation of an app and a Firefox extension. The bad news is that not
all distributions respond the same way to these workarounds.
Ultimately, this falls into the hands of the Linux community to resolve,
as touchscreens aren’t going away (and, in fact, will continue to rise
in popularity). With that said, let’s take a look at what you can do to
get that shiny new touchscreen device working in a way that actually
makes sense.
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