Hacker News Reader

Comment by caymanjim | Hacker News Reader

I can't read the article because the site is hosed. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme, and the touchpad is as good as any MacBook I've ever owned. It's the only non-MacBook that I've encountered where the touchpad is even usable.

I don't usually run Linux on it, but I have, and I don't recall it behaving any differently than it does in Windows. Maybe the pinch gesture doesn't work in Linux; I'm not going to reboot to test.

View on HN

I bought the same laptop and was very disappointed by the touchpad.

particularly the physical clicking. It got progressively harder to click as you moved up from the bottom 1/4 of the touchpad.

It appears it's actually designed that way, where it's sort of hinged from the top. I hadn't noticed myself, since I prefer the soft click. Odd design decision, and if you're a hard-clicker, I can understand being disappointed.

Lots of touchpads work this way.

Including the pre-force touch Apple ones

I switched from a Macbook Pro to the X1 Extreme as well, and have been very disappointed.

* The touchpad doesn't feel as smooth as the Macbook Pro (despite it also being glass) -- there's some sort of matte finish which gives it a more rubbery finish.

* The gestures are less accurate (I frequently activate 3-finger gestures despite only using 2 fingers).

* The buttons at the top are harder to use than buttons on the bottom.

* You can only click the touchpad on the bottom half.

How does the X1's trackpad compare in size to a MBP? Trackpad is probably the showstopper that kept me from switching to some Linux in the past.

I also have a X1 Extreme, it's a bit smaller than the MacBook touchpad, but I concur that it is very responsive and works reasonably well with ubuntu 18.04.2.

It's a fair bit smaller than the current MBP touchpad. More like older MBP models. I don't like how gigantic the current MBP one is. Apple does a good job of ignoring rogue palm touches, via software, but in a way that makes it unresponsive when you want to do keyboard+touchpad combinations (which are rare, but important in some drawing apps and some games). Overall I find that I don't need that much touchpad real estate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com