Ockam VS libinput

disclosure: I work at Ockam.

The Portals for Mac app is an example of the type of thing you could build using the open source stack of protocols. The README (linked by parent) links out to all of the relevant parts of the protocol documentation to explain how these work together. The NAT Traversal (https://github.com/build-trust/ockam/blob/develop/examples/a...) part of the README is probably the best explanation of why the free relay you get via Ockam Orchestrator is a useful part of this demo.

As for why would anyone trust this: The protocols are designed so you absolutely don't have to trust the relay. Trust is pushed out to the edges that you control and so you're not susceptible to a MITM attack if something like a relay is compromised. The protocol design for all of this is open and documented, and was independently audited by (IMO) some of the best in the business, Trail of Bits: https://docs.ockam.io/reference/protocols.

🚀 Portals for Mac – A macOS app built in Swift that uses the Ockam Rust library to privately share a service on your Mac with anyone, anywhere. The service is shared securely over an end-to-end encrypted and mutually authenticated Ockam Portal. Your friends will have access to it on their localhost! This app is a great example of the kinds of things you can build with Ockam 👉

Ockam is a suite of programming libraries, command line tools, and managed cloud services to orchestrate end-to-end encryption, mutual authentication, key management, credential management, and authorization policy enforcement — all at massive scale. Ockam's end-to-end secure channels guarantee authenticity, integrity, and confidentiality of all data-in-motion at the application layer.

We’ve been working on something (https://github.com/build-trust/ockam) that enables exactly this, among a whole host of other use cases. If you check out some of the code examples in the docs you’ll see how to setup a tunnel using the CLI.

For other use cases there’s also the programming libraries (only Rust atm, though I was spiking a TypeScript/Node PoC this week) which might provide more flexibility. Personally I’m excited by the idea of being able to move this kind of secure by design connectivity all the way into the application layer though.

If you're not already an active contributor to an open source project or two it can seem very daunting. You don't want to do the wrong thing and embarrass yourself. Remove that anxiety for people by giving them an easy way to do something low risk. Matt did that a couple of years ago by creating a long-lived issue for people to simply say hello. That's it. Say hi, introduce yourself. It's a safe place to make a first step.

$> git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput $> cd libinput $> meson --prefix=/usr builddir/ $> ninja -C builddir/ $> sudo ninja -C builddir/ install

If you're using libinput then (probably, though I'm not 100% sure) you can fix it with libinput "quirks". You should ask these guys. They helped me once with my mouse.

You can report libinput bugs here

> That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best.

100%. On my personal devices I don't want to compromise on trackpad or keyboards (I like that apple went back on the butterfly keyboards).

The rest of my comment is just my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. I've found the trackpad experience on the XPS and Thinkpad X1 laptops to be excellent under linux. The libinput [1] drivers seem to work really well and the gesture support seems nice too. What I miss from MacBook's touchpad is force-touch. Not having to worry about which part of the touchpad i'm pressing was really nice when I used a macbook.

I'm contemplating purchasing a m1 macbook air as my next laptop, but I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money.

[1] https://github.com/wayland-project/libinput