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Comment by savolai | Hacker News Reader

You need to experience it to understand just how much more calibrated it is to the human experience, feels natural, like air. :) How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?

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I went to an Apple store to try just this and came away unimpressed. Apart from the much better integration of gestures with the OS, I didn't feel anything special about the touchpad or its acceleration curve. In fact the touchpad was quite annoying to use because there was a kind of block on movement after a click that was far to long, making it difficult to click multiple different things quickly in a row. Overall I preferred my own laptop using libinput at the time :)

> kind of block on movement after a click that was far to long

There are two modes of operation, what you dislike is the default; the other is called tap-to-click, which doesn’t give you haptic feedback and you can click however fast you want. Opinion is divided on this, with many diehards swearing by the haptic feedback. I prefer tap-to-click.

Tap-to-click is slower though, if I understand correctly. Imagine clicking three adjacent buttons in a row as fast as possible. If you tap each one you have to lift your finger off the trackpad 5 times.

I can lift my finger just a tiny bit to register another click way faster than the haptic feedback would allow me.

What he's arguing is that if you have this:

BUTTON 1 - BUTTON 2 - BUTTON 3

In your situation, you have to tap, lift finger, place finger to move, lift finger, tap, etc. In the other situation, you have to place finger, press lightly, move finger, press lightly, move finger, etc.

Using tap-to-click can't be faster than the other situation.

That said, I use both. Sometimes I just tap, sometimes I press, sometimes I press harder.

Not during lockdown I'm afraid.

I guess if it's a "feel" thing it should be possible to replicate it with lots of tweaking, but I don't think many people who run Linux on laptops use the Apple trackpad much so the overlap between the people who want this and the people who care to write such drivers probably isn't big enough to come up with a Macbook style driver.

If you’re thinking tuning as in artist sensibility and acceleration then you’re quite off, the experience goes way beyond this.

For example rest two fingers and press to click, that’s a right click. But rest two fingers and click with the thumb, that’s still a right click, not a three finger click. Same for two finger scrolling. That’s a couple of simple examples but there are a lot of subtle corner cases like that all around the experience which are not just about tuning some values.

Yeah, I’m not sure why there’s such a massive contingent that admit to having never owned an Apple product (some snarky comment about the Apple tax) and dismiss the hordes of serious engineers who use these products. Can you get 90% of the way there with your favorite flavor of Linux? Yup. Are there some things that Linux does far better? Definitely (looking at you containers). But it’s that 10% sugar that make most (not all) people more productive. But if I can make my expensive engineers more productive by spending a few hundred $ premium on the single most important piece of kit I’m giving them, well that’s insanely good ROI.

Because closed source software is worse for everyone. Regardless of any other feature, being closed source makes Apple products a non-starter for a sizeable subset of the population.

"sizeable subset of the population" is a bit of an overstatement. Most people are fine with running Windows or macOS. There's just a vocal minority that wants open source stuff.

s/artist/adjust/

I'm a huge linux fan and run both Ubuntu and Arch Linux on a daily basis, but I used to be on OSX and Apple hardware between something like 2012 -> 2015 before switching back to Ubuntu/Arch. The only thing Apple does better is touchpad input.

And I also cannot put the difference into words, but if you have Ubuntu (even with synaptics drivers) and MacBook side by side, there is a noticeable difference in how they behave and feel but even by having them side-by-side, I can't consciously tell the difference, even if I feel it.

One of the main differences is that MacOS has visibly lower latency when scrolling / moving the mouse pointer. This is immediately visible when you scroll the same webpage on Safari/Mac vs Firefox or Chrome on Linux.

I don't know exactly why this is happening, and there is no in-browser option that can overcome this difference, e.g. disabling smooth scrolling and enabling XInput2 helps but does not overcome the difference. It seems to be something more fundamental in how the drivers work and deliver input to the user interface.

Interesting, just tried this, where I compared my laptop (Ubuntu) and desktop (Arch) with my Macbook, and the latency actually seems lower on Linux than OSX, seems OSX has some smoothing that seems to make things look/feel slower. Scrolling is clearly faster on my laptop and desktop than the Macbook (didn't even had to record a video to see the difference), tried Firefox on both Linuxes and Safari/Chrome/Firefox on Macbook with the same result.

So the quest continues...

I'm switching between mbp and xps15 and honestly couldn't describe the difference. They're slightly different, but I wouldn't call either one "better".

> How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?

After lockdown of course...

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