Linux Notebooks to Get Touch Gesture Support Soon

Synaptics, the manufacturer of most touchpads found in laptops, has made the Synaptics Gesture Suite for Linux (SGS-L) available for OEMs. Touch interfaces are becoming an increasingly popular way of interacting with devices. After the coming of  iPhone, everyone love to have a touch interface. Apple notebooks have had multi-touch and gesture support for a while now, and Windows users also get to enjoy the feature. More or less, but today, plenty of laptops support gestures through the touchpad. For Linux though, as always, this was problematic. But now Linux users also enjoy this feature very soon. 
According to Synaptics most of the popular Linux distributions will be support this feature including Fedora, Millos Linpus, Red Flag, SLED 11 (SuSE), Ubuntu, and Xandros. But it’s not clear 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.

Ted Theocheung, head of Synaptics PC and digital home products and ecosystem, said in the press release, “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,”.

“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. It will enable manufacturers who build Linux-powered notebooks to implement multi-touch support out of the box. But the fact is, very few people buy a notebook with Linux pre-installed, most Linux enthusiasts install it by themselves. The reason is the availability of different Linux distro in variety of features in no cost mostly. Hence this feature would be enough for any other operating system but not in case of Linux.

This will enables OEMs to customize the software as per as 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.

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