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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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