> How do you make an OS where the main pointing device on half of the market sucks and assign that low priority?
Because Linux isn't "an OS". It's a kernel made by one set of developers, combined with a bunch of operating systems made by a second set of developers, which pick and choose compositors/window managers/etc. often made by a third set of developers. Each of these sets of developers are pretty good at solving bugs that live entirely in their "domain", but when there's an issue which crosses these interface boundaries, there is nobody to "assign priority", never mind actually work to fix it.
(Not to mention, systemd demonstrates that trying to solve these kinds of pan-system problems earns you little gratitude but tons of vociferous hatred, so people are not inclined to do it.)
That's why I mentioned Ubuntu; if anyone has incentive and resources to contribute to all these projects and get smooth scrolling working it's Canonical. If _they_ can't, I guess that means the whole community is screwed on that side. Maybe it's going to work 20 years from now, when we've moved on from trackpads to AI voice interfaces.
In 20 years there will be so much baggage to fix that we’ll be at the same point we are now “ugh but you have to rewrite everything from the ground up and update so many programs…”
That's what I think is the problem. And exactly the reason I thought cosmic could get this right. There is a lot of promising decisions in this project, but maybe it'll take a while to work as expected :-)
Because Linux isn't "an OS". It's a kernel made by one set of developers, combined with a bunch of operating systems made by a second set of developers, which pick and choose compositors/window managers/etc. often made by a third set of developers. Each of these sets of developers are pretty good at solving bugs that live entirely in their "domain", but when there's an issue which crosses these interface boundaries, there is nobody to "assign priority", never mind actually work to fix it.
(Not to mention, systemd demonstrates that trying to solve these kinds of pan-system problems earns you little gratitude but tons of vociferous hatred, so people are not inclined to do it.)