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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I have a Dell XPS 13 as my personal machine. It runs Linux. Everything works.

But, I still find myself using my MacBook Pro (provided by work) for almost everything even at home.

Two things that keep me in the Mac land.

1. Retina Display and the 16:10 aspect ratio. 2. Smooth, and usable touchpad.

XPS13's display is too rectangle and I'm not watching movies in it. It feels too cramped for looking at code. GNOME out of the box does not do fractional scaling (125%) hence everything looks either too big or too small to my taste.

I dont have the patience or the know-how to tune the touchpad to be decent in Linux.

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I'd recommend testing a live image of KDE Neon. I loaded it on my Dell Latitude 7370 (distant cousin of the XPS 13) which has a 13" QHD+ touchscreen, and I'm quite impressed with the "out of the box" experience with KDE Neon. There are still a some applications that don't handle the DPI scaling well, but I had that problem on Windows too.

For touchpad, replace Synaptics with libinput and it just works (tm), including palm rejection.

Gestures are still hard. Scrolling is becoming fine (mostly with recent apps based on GTK3/Qt5), but other gestures are still barely recognized even with hacks, at least for me on Elementary. I think it will still improve over time, but about as slowly as it has in the past.

This was my experience as well, on the Precision 5520.

This is the perfect description of why I’ll probably never leave Mac land. I want my technology to work out the box, and Mac does that.

Sure I could probably setup the Linux trackpad to be Mac like if I threw plenty of hours at it, but I don’t want to waste my time like that, not anymore. I did in my youth, but now I’ll just buy the thing that works.

I wish there are less people like you and more people who want to fix things. For reasons which should be obvious I guess.

Maybe Dell should fix their trackpad.

Who has a useful trackpad anyways? An actually great one, besides Apple?

I have no idea why this is the case? Patents or too expensive to justify?

Genuinely curious

De-coupling of hardware and software mainly. All kinds of 3rd parties writing drivers for the trackpad for an OS they don't have control over.

I've heard the Microsoft Surface is very good.

It is lovely, as is the Surface Book 2, the pen inking is sublime ;)

Most Windows PCs which ship with precision drivers and an oversized glass trackpad feel 90% as good as the MacBooks. The Surface line and the new Razer Blade 15 are two examples.

The precision drivers are key. Many manufacturers still haven't adopted them, and they are the main reason why Windows trackpads still get a bad rep.

I like my XPS 13 trackpad :) The mac ones seems too big, suspect it would be in the way and hamper the keyboard. (I haven't used a the newer Mac models enough to be certain). Dells works great on Linux (Arch + KDE)

It is too big. It's nice but too big. It is, however, an excellent trackpad. Reviews constantly name it #1.

Surface's trackpad is as good as Mac's even though all other parts of experience is trash.

However, now Mac has this force touchpad which you don't really press, so it recognises all of the presses with no respect to where you do it. Nobody has anything like this and I must tell you that one gets used to it reaaaaaaly quick.

I have no issues with it. Macs may have a better trackpad, but there's absoultely nothing wrong with it. I'm using Arch w/i3 and use whatever stock settings there are.

> I want my technology to work out the box, and Mac does that.

Same here, but with a twist: out of the box, Linux makes it easier for me to install the things I need to do my job. The display, power management, etc. issues are all frustrating, true, but ultimately not as important.

Different folks have different priorities.

What is your job? What kind of things do you install?

Kind of curious, because no matter what machine I use, every time I start fresh, it takes about a day to get up and running. Linux is even worse because of drivers.

> Linux is even worse because of drivers.

In my hardware that's where Linux excels over Windows. YMMV.

I'm a software developer so for me: dev tools, basic shell utilities, PostgreSQL, Docker, etc.

All those things work pretty well on OSX. I really really like Linux, but only on CLI. Every time I touch a desktop running linux I get frustrated. OSX isn't perfect - but as a productive environment, it's the best fit or me personally.

And I'd love to upgrade my 2013 13" mba with an mbp, mainly for the display, but the keyboard issues on recent mbp's make me hesitant of spending that much money on it...

The thing is though, it's just not true (anymore) that Mac "just works" all that much better.

I use Linux and Mac daily and I probably spend a comparable amount of time on configuring both.

You just don't feel the pain that you're used to.

My experience is totally different to yours. Every time I install any desktop linux, I spend hours looking up how to get all kinds of little things working. Macs have their problems (not least of which the crappy hardware which is driving so many developers, including me, away). But difficulty of setup & configuration is not one of them for most people.

I’m not picky about the screen, but I am super picky about trackpads from using macs. My dell chrombook feels every bit as good as the Mac. Fortunately for me the Gallium os distro for Chromebooks reuses the chrome os touchpad driver. I dell Precision model at work and that touch pad sucks!

I'm amazed nobody else has matched Apple's glass touch input devices. Luckily the external Magic Trackpad works pretty well with the XPS 13.

I think it’s because Apple has the patent on glass on metal trackpads

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cultofmac.com/210380/apple-...

Interesting. The Surface products (e.g., the Surface Book) use glass on metal.

Maybe they licensed the tech or used a plexiglass? Not a lawyer, but was curious myself why it wasn’t used more so had just googled about it.

Microsoft and Apple have a comprehensive cross-licensing agreement, so that would make sense.

Razer comes close in feel.

Do they come close in build quality though? I’m legit curious; I haven’t used a Razer laptop in years, but the last one I played with wasn’t super impressive in that regard.

They did change the design and hid the buttons, and use the win precision drivers now.

I have a late-2016 Blade Stealth, and the build quality is... just ok. The keyboard (coming from a MacBook Air) took some getting used to. The battery is crap and has swelled up and warped the chassis. Heat has destroyed the adhesisve on the front rubber foot, which has fallen off. The screen has a bezel that might even be larger than the MacBook Air, which is lame.

The touchpad is really good, though.

I think Apple's touchpads are horrible. They're too grippy and too big.

(I have nothing constructive to add here, I just wanted there to be some opposition to the idea that Apple have the perfect touchpad)

What trackpad do you prefer using?

1) LOVE 16:10/8:5. Currently I have a 3240x2160 panel in my HP Spectre x360. I WISH it were 3240x2400. I WANT 2400p PANELS.

2) I'm far from an expert on this: I don't know why it's taken more than a decade to figure out trackpad motion.

> taken more than a decade to figure out trackpad motion.

Patents?

But you don’t even see it in like an unofficial libinput patch done by someone who is hobby-passionate. I’ve never had a good trackpad experience outside of Apple and I refuse to believe it hasn’t been reversed.. It can’t be patents, can it?

I legit used to no-scope people in Halo Combat Evolves on my PowerBook G4 back in the day - with the trackpad.

I remember Microsoft put gpu makers through hell when they put out the driver framework thing a few years ago? I wish they took trackpads seriously (even for gaming) and forced that synaptics shit out. Maybe people laugh at the idea of gaming with a trackpad but I wish it were possible even if I’m a minority. I wish games could support trackpad gestures too.

Also I meant 3840x* above.

Of all the things other copy from Apple, so few copy the 16:10 screen. At least the Surface display is what, 3:2 now? But everyone else is still bloody 16:9.

Interesting, I've been using a non-touch XPS for about a year now and the feature I've unexpectedly grown to love most is the matt screen, which has great viewing angles and and much less glare.

The matte screen is one of the main reasons I got an XPS 13.

In many environments I don't like the reflections of a bright window behind me or the ceiling office lights.

You can buy matte stickers to put on glossy Mac screens, but they can be hard to apply well without bubbles.

> I dont have the patience or the know-how to tune the touchpad to be decent in Linux. I thought it would be an issue too, however Gnome and latest ubuntu fixed issues with trackpad and screen resolution

How hard is it for device makers to prefect the touchpad? It should be a no brainer like mouse devices by now huh?

Someone has. It's in MacBooks.

I get that I'm in the extreme minority here, but I pretty much hate all touchpads, including Apple's. I hate Apple's the least, so I will concede that Apple makes the best touch pads.

I wish all the PC makers would stop trying to copy the Apple model of "all touch surface, and the pad on a rocker for buttons". I'm probably being old and cranky (for context, my very first laptop was an Apple Powerbook 170 with a track ball, and it was AWESOME), but I prefer the days when you could get a consumer laptop that had a touchpad with two discrete buttons. These days, you're generally stuck choosing from some ugly business and gaming laptops if you want real touchpad buttons.

Funny, I liked the trackball laptops as well. I had an old Zenith with one and later a Dell laptop with one (Latitude Xpi iirc). That Dell had MMX, so it would play mp3s in Musicmatch Jukebox without skipping like my desktop at the time would. Desktop trackballs are still a thing; I like my Kensington Expert Mouse Wireless Trackball quite a bit with my mac. The scroll ring feels kind of janky for a $100 mouse but it works.

On the new one, it’s no longer on a rocker. If you manage to deep freeze the kernel, the trackpad stops clicking. The click is somehow created after force touch(?) deems your press to be hard enough for click.

Hello fellow minority. Though I don't like Apple's at all, albeit the last time I used one was in 2014 or 2015 so maybe they're better. I liked my really old Dell Inspiron 1000's better than the Macbooks I've tried. And I used to use a laptop with just a nub in the middle and two buttons below the space bar, that was my favorite, I could actually play FPS games with it, and it meshed well with vim usage. But these days I almost always just use a wireless mouse. It's no extra cost to carry around when I have to carry around a charger, the times I want/need to use a laptop in a suboptimal environment (like on my lap) are so minimal that I can't care too much about the quality of a touchpad. Does it let me tap once to click, tap with two fingers to right click? Good enough.

I could never make touchpads work for me. The only laptops I could tolerate were Lenovo's because of the touchpoint thing. My first MacBook was the first time I had a touchpad I could not only use but actively liked.

But actually my Lenovo with Linux touchpad and Chromebooks are all fine for me today. Though my MacBooks and external Apple touchpad on my desktop are still the best. The only touchpad that still annoys me to the point where I need to use a mouse is a 17" Dell Alienware laptop running Windows 10.

The 'Force Touch' trackpads I am not a fan of at all. I do not like them nearly as much as my 2012 MBP that actually clicks. They had them perfected and then messed with them IMHO.

Really? I find the Force Touch trackpads to "click" in almost the same way as the older ones did.

+1 on that. Especially since the force touch. I've been using Macbooks for 10 years now and just don't understand why other trackpads just don't work flawlessly. For me other trackpads feel like the difference with smartphones and old phone touchscreens. I even enjoy gaming on a Macbook trackpad.

its probably insanely expensive/complex to revisit the cheap commodity touchpad hardware and the crappy drivers that already available. & doesn't pencil out with the razor thin margins for PC laptops

PC laptops don't cost that much less than similarly speced macbooks. Why would their margins be so much worse?

You need a lot of R&D to get there.

I agree with the lack of proper touchpad support. There are ways around it, but I'd like to not have to spend a day determining if libinput, mtrack, or synaptec is the right driver for my needs.

The touchpad is the only reason keeping me on MacOS. If Linux had drivers for the trackpad that were on par with MacOS, I'd run Linux on my Macbook.

Using Linux on a Mac trackpad, I can tap with 3 fingers for a middle (button 2, the wheel button) and so open links in another tab, close tabs, execute selection ...

I find that feature more interesting than gestures. Ymmv.

Doesn't Ubuntu 18.04 have an ability to do fractional scaling when used under Wayland (not X.org)?

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