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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

The touchpad on my current gen Dell XPS 13 is superb on a stock Ubuntu install. I'd love to know how much of the "bad touchpad" reputation that Linux has is down to low quality hardware versus software support.

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Have you tried a Mac touchpad? I use both a Dell XPS13 (Ubuntu from factory) at home, and a MacBook Pro at work. The Mac's touchpad is miles ahead... and that's even after I spent a couple of days messing with libinput settings to make the Dell's touchpad more acceptable (it's fine now, just not really close to the precision of the Mac's touchpad).

In what ways is it ahead? I'm quite satisfied with the touchpad on Linux, so really wondering what I'm missing.

On the other hand touchscreen is really disappointing on Linux (Ubuntu), just not a smooth experience at all for me.

It's really quite difficult to quantify what's actually different. It feels really precise without being "flicky", using it feels very natural and you sort of forget about the touchpad and just will the cursor on the screen to do as you wish.

I've always struggled to articulate why I prefer the MacBook's trackpad to every other trackpad I've used, and I think you've hit on something with that last sentence. It feels so natural that I really just don't ever think about it, my brain skips straight to the actual interface I'm using it to manipulate.

I get the same feeling with high vs low quality touchscreens (e.g. my phone vs some ATMs), and especially with gaming controllers. With a good, ergonomic controller I sort of forget about the shape and weight of the controller in my hands after a while; my entire sense of it narrows down to the buttons/triggers/joysticks.

Most likely its cursor acceleration. macOS dynamically adjusts the cursor movements based on the user swipe speed which makes it feel both precise and fast.

Last time I used Linux on my MBP, libinput was more... linear.

Got a Dell XPS 15, and the touchpad trashes every other laptop I've tried, but in my opinion, it still doesn't even come close to MBP's trackpad.

I'm also very happy with my xps 13 touchpad under Linux. I think it's on par our even better than under Windows. However I never used Mac touchpads.

I have the XPS 13 9350 and i like the touchpad as well. There‘s always room for a little improvement but during daily use it‘s not that i‘m annoyed by the touchpad. Not at all.

the xps i tried a couple of years ago was not even close to mbp quality, it felt 10 years behind

Agreed. The Mac Touchpads are light years better. I’m not a hardware not drivers guy: so my naïve gut feeling is just: ‘how hard can it be?’.

I’d love to contribute to this project, but I’m not sure how.

I guess it matters for folks who come from the Mac world and expect all trackpads to be like on their Macs.

That reputation comes from people who switch from Windows to Linux and see the quality diminish substantially. That's hardly a hardware problem.

I switched from Windows to Linux on one laptop just to get better touchpad feel...

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