Comment by gmueckl
5 hours ago
Pinch to zoom and two finger scrolling work well for me in most Windows apps. Apple has a few touchoad gestures that I don't believe have equivalents elsewhere, but they would be pretty neat.
The main issue with going beyond the mouse is that it involves changes across the event handling stack. For track pads, you have to build multi-touch infrastructure up ro a point and then there is a decision: what are gestures that are handled at a desktop level? What are gestures that get converted into semantically similar events (e.g. tap->LMB click)? What gets passed through as multi-touch? This ends up touching a lot of parts of the desktop software stack and the amount of required buy in to get this done on Linux seems massive.
Then change the stack. We can't be stuck on obsolete inefficient mental models. We are programmers, we can change software to fit new requirements. We already found ways to deliver keyboard input to the focused window.