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Comment by anuragsoni | Hacker News Reader

> That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best.

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.

[1] https://github.com/wayland-project/libinput

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> 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.

[0] https://github.com/marcan

Caveat: may not include an awesome trackpad driver.

If it includes a GPU driver, then the trackpad driver is trivial compared to that.

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...

True, but then why don't we have awesome Linux trackpad drivers for Intel Macbooks?

Isn't there a 1-2 year old project that claims to have made great trackpad driver behavior in Linux?

I think this is the case I remember:

https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...

We don’t even have them for Bootcamp.

Apple’s trackpad driver is massive, I think. Do not underestimate the amount of detailed work that went into it.

Doing output is trivial compared to properly handling any type of free-form user input.

A GPU driver for a new undocumentated architecture is "trivial" compared to properly doing an input driver for a touchpad?

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...

It's because there is no great trackpad support outside the Mac. But there is good GPU support. So it seems, getting great trackpad support IS rocket science currently, for whatever reason. (I also wonder, what is going on there? I guess people on the other platforms just don't care about this detail, otherwise they would be on the Mac anyway).

I imagine getting the trackpad right is either a giant pile of heuristic rules, or a nice tagged data set for ML, or both, maybe with a side of online learning from usage. A trackpad that automatically does the right thing for me coding, my 12 year old gaming, and my 8 year old with sloppy fine motor control does seem like rocket science to me.

There are a lot of crappy trackpads on crappy PC laptops, but the ones on the high-end laptops are quite serviceable even if not the ideal version that Apple created. With a serviceable trackpad, the other benefits of having a PC over a Mac tend to far outweigh the trackpad (for people that value what a PC brings).

Yes, I understand that, I am just not getting my head around why for example Windows is so bad with a trackpad either. I mean, how tough would it be for Microsoft to nail this if they cared?

They probably don't see it as their job. The fact that trackpad quality varies between makes/models implies that it's both a hardware and a software problem, the latter probably being drivers. Maybe there is something in the OS that hampers it though, I don't know. Would be interesting to hear from engineers at the OEMs. Frankly, when I read these comments about the problems of PC trackpads, it's like a foreign language to me. Problems with gestures, multi-touch or palm strikes.. I can't recall the last time I had a PC laptop with those problems. My XPS 2-in-1 9310 sits in a bag across the room and am typing on a four-five year old Lenovo right now, neither of which have any such problems. What I notice on the wife's MBP trackpad is the feel (glass) and the (good) lack of physical movement in trackpad - this lenovo is clearly a momentary switch and at the very upper end of the pad the force to needed to click is tougher, but it hardly matters. A tap accomplishes the same thing that a physical click does and is probably how I engage it most often. I'm just not sure it's as big a problem with decently-built PC laptops as people make it out to be. PC hardware has a lot more going for it that overshadows the delta between a 99% trackpad and a 94% trackpad. Things like a touchscreen, active digitizers, tablet modes, escape keys, function keys, facial recognition, variety.

I will never need a touchscreen in my laptop. That's what my iPad is for, which I can connect to my laptop, by the way. Function keys I've last used in the previous millennium, and I've got an escape key, thank you very much. My laptop automatically unlocks via my watch. But yes, I expect facial recognition to come to the Mac very soon, too.

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.

>I will never need a touchscreen in my laptop

We'll see how that ages, but rock on with your mac.

It's been that way for over a decade. It aged pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TcJ45Y2z30

I didn't mention this in my comment, but i use wayland on linux and i've found the touchpad experience to be nicer there compared to X11, even though both X11 and wayland sessions for Gnome use libinput. I don't know much about libinput to know why I feel a difference in my touchpad experience between X11 and wayland.

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