100%. On my personal devices I don't want to compromise on trackpad or keyboards (I like that apple went back on the butterfly keyboards).
The rest of my comment is just my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. I've found the trackpad experience on the XPS and Thinkpad X1 laptops to be excellent under linux. The libinput [1] drivers seem to work really well and the gesture support seems nice too. What I miss from MacBook's touchpad is force-touch. Not having to worry about which part of the touchpad i'm pressing was really nice when I used a macbook.
I'm contemplating purchasing a m1 macbook air as my next laptop, but I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money.
May I suggest sponsoring Hector Martin on GitHub[0]? He’s working on building first-class support for the M1 architecture (including drivers) into Linux.
Actually manufacturing the trackpad hardware might be difficult/expensive, but since that's already a given, the driver can be tweaked in tons of ways to fit the regular macOS experience...
I think this is the case I remember:
https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
You make "properly handling any type of free-form user input" sound like rocket science, when it's the regular multi-touch kind of driver we have on billions of mobiles, and laptops...
The "properly" here is just the sauce for macOS handling, not some inherent difficulty of "handling any type of free-form user input" on a 2D surface...
And I've never used a PC trackpad with satisfaction rate of > 30% ;-) They are all shite.
I guess it is just a matter of preference. As I said, if you care about the trackpad, you will never touch a PC laptop. If you don't, you think you have a 94% trackpad, and that it doesn't matter.
We'll see how that ages, but rock on with your mac.
Also note that Lenovo itself has a huge variation in trackpad quality. My relatively new thinkpad (thinkpad-branded but I think the model number was yoga 360) from work has a trackpad that is just barely usable. My personal yoga c740 has a trackpad that is actually pretty nice and gets close to MBP quality when it comes to movement/accuracy (it does still lack gestures and good right-click support though, and that is likely a software issue).
I really hope these guys pick good trackpads. I can grudgingly live with a stunted feature set (gestures etc) for now because I know X makes it difficult or impossible to get right, but I absolutely cannot abide a trackpad that feels shitty and inaccurate just for moving the mouse around.
What your parent comment (the comment you replied to) said refutes the reply you made.
They installed OSX on a ThinkPad, and observed the desired OSX-like trackpad behavior. Apple does not write firmware for thinkpad pointing devices, so it cannot be firmware-specific behavior.
My conclusion was to disable the trackpad and always carry an external mouse. I do a lot of CAD work and there's nothing that compares to a real mouse for speed and precision.
I'll use my Trackpoint nib in a pinch, but the trackpad ecosystem is so bad that I just write it off entirely. Yeah, keeping a mouse on hand is annoying, but it's like a physical keyboard: Would you ever buy a laptop where you had to input reams of text with a touchscreen keyboard? No, that's absurd, keyboards are a necessary part of a computer. Would you ever buy a trackpad for a desktop PC? I wouldn't, I'd use a mouse.
That's what happens when you're the most successful technology company in the world, and you hire the best engineers in the world and laser-focus them on thr user experience.
Design and UX-wise, the current laptop market is a shitshow and Apple seems to be the only company that consistently cares about the little things. Sure, they've messed up in the past (butterfly keyboards), but there is still a sense of progress.
Not only was that not the case, it was worse than my own pessimism that I started with.
The fan noise and the trackpad were so bad to the point that it felt like a joke, even though I knew it wasn't. People are just oblivious to this stuff and march onward none the wiser, even the people who should be doing things like comparative analysis on quality against their competitors' products.
I returned it after doing all the windows and driver updates, choosing "quiet mode" in the Dell Power Management software. The fan would kick on while cpu strolled along at 10 or 15%. Replaced it with an xps 13 which has been fine. (I have had several xps so decided to chance it).
Perhaps it needs to be a score via a user test e.g click these small randomly appearing boxes in the shortest time possible
I realize a sibling poster had a different hackintosh experience. I think that maybe supports my suspicion. Good hardware and good software are both necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of a good overall experience.
It even feels amazing, physically. It's smooth and your finger just glides right over it and still registers the touch with barely any pressure. The combination of the hardware, the size, and the software (drivers, OS, whatever else) is just the best I've ever used. Best of all, it's like that right out of the box.
For laptops, at least, I'm solidly Apple for the trackpad alone, I like it that much.
I mean... Apple will also "confidently" sell you four little castor wheels for 700 quid[0]. I'm not sure we should view their eagerness to take money off you as a sign of how great they are.
[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pr...
In fact, that line of chromebooks had the best overall package. Slim, but very sturdy plastic body, a surprisingly good keyboard, ~10 hour battery life. The 13" FHD screen was OK, but not amazing, I would have liked an IPS panel instead of TN.
The major downside is that it was a 32-bit ARM-based chromebook and everyone was going 64-bit x86 instead. So it got slower and slower with each successive update, eventually it couldn't even play 1080p Youtube videos anymore, or even 720p60. Such a shame.
Look at Firefox for an example of the latter. I'm typing this on a Chromebook intended to run ChromeOS, but it's actually running Ubuntu. The touchpad experience from the factory is as good as it should be. When you wipe the machine and install Ubuntu and use Chrome, it's still pretty good. Running Firefox on the same system gives you its same janky scroll behavior that you get anywhere else that isn't a MacBook, for no good reason.
People act like there's some yet-to-be-understood law of nature that make MacBook touchpads good and everything else bad. This is demonstrably false. We have existence proofs to the contrary.
The gulf continues to be so big that after so much time of nobody else even appearing to try to compete, I assume it's patents.
Apple did it right 15 years ago and why do others still suck at it?
Always an external mouse in the backpack and the nipple as a fallback.
That thing on a macbook is so absurdly large that it's impossible to type without cursor doing some action.
Funny that
Commenting on a thread about a non-apple laptop that you'll never buy a Non apple laptop.
That is true and unadultered fanboyism.
The touchpad. Nothing else. Just the touchpad?
I'm not given to hyperbole but methinks there's a lot of info and technical requirements that go into purchasing an expensive item such as a laptop. Screen size and quality, keyboard quality, ports, batter life, weight, performance, looks - oh you know...normal stuff.
At least for us normal people. Maybe my mistake was there.