I know this has already been discussed(Idea# 388), but not got the attention I think it deserves. And allthough it is more of an XServer or window manager topic, I think the Ubuntu community has much influence on linux developement in general.

I watched a video of the first approaches of multitouch interfaces years ago and had the strong feeling at once, that whoever gets his hands on that kind of technology first will soon be several steps ahead when it comes to future user interaction. So I got mad when I saw that, of all things, Microsoft came up with the first (you cannot seriously disagree!) impressive presentation. The iPhone is another story, I think.

You will say that affordable hardware will be far away for the average linux user. But multitouch will come (I don't mind if future proves me wrong ;)) and the thing is, that you can not compare our established principles of graphical user interaction to the ones that multitouch will require. This is going to be a totally new and unlimited field of research, which the open source community can in no way afford to ignore.

I once played with the idea of pretesting such concepts by implementing a two mouse interface. The major drawback with this is that you focus the pointer to work precisely with a mouse, and focussing two pointers at the same time will be difficult. You will have to set a high level of tollerance for your graphical objects. But it was meant for experimenting and not for any real productivity. I eventually failed with my idea just because my programming experience is rather poor; only a bit of java...But maybe someone had similar ideas and can handle code a little better that me.

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