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Comment by dschuessler | Hacker News Reader

The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable. Another comment here on HN described it as the trackpad completely disappearing from your mind. You don't have to fight it at all. You don't even think about it anymore. The cursor just becomes a natural extension of your hand.

Also, as a person working with PDF documents on a regular basis, I don't know of any application that can beat the feature set and UX of Preview.app.

These are the only two things keeping me back. If there were viable alternatives in the Linux ecosystem I'd switch in a heartbeat.

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I've been using a Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop for a year now and it's great. Two finger scroll and right click works, but it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS.

Inertial scrolling depends on the app, but Firefox implements it well and that takes care of 80% of it for me.

>it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS.

I can highly recommend BetterTouchTool, it has a wide range of features, but one of the easiest to use is map three-finger-tap to middle click

Any idea on how to adjust the minimum steps? I can't figure out how to change it in firefox running on PureOS/Gnome Wayland. Also two finger swipe for back or forward doesn't work very well using the firefox extension SwipeToNavigate.

It's kind of crazy how long Preview.app has been one the best at what it does. I remember it being a minor revolution back in the early 2000s, running like butter compared to the clunky-even-then Adobe Reader and handily sweeping up a few different format viewers into one app.

It's been 20 years and still no other desktop environment ships with a true equivalent.

GNOME Sushi is very impressive.

I'll always be a Linux enthusiast, but this is one of the key things that keeps me on macOS at least some of the time. To be honest I don't think there's a reason to nail your colours to the mast with any OS, there's no reason not to use two for different tasks. I juggle macOS, Linux, and to a lesser extent FreeBSD just fine, although the context switch is much more expensive adding Windows to the mix in my experience although I expect a lot of that is down to personal taste (I'm very set in my *nix ways).

> The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable

Only if you use it as your main OS. If you use a combination of Windows, Linux and MacOS, the latter's trackpad tends to do the opposite of what you expect. the first thing I do is change the vertical scroll direction so it behaves like the others.

Funny, I change the others because they’re clearly wrong :)

The direction of scroll is one small part of it. The Mac trackpad is perfectly balanced in various important areas: knowing when to reject extraneous fingers, high DPI/resolution, just the right size and shape, the same height as the rest of the laptop, feels smooth rather than some weird studded plastic nonsense, etc.

That's not mac-specific.

My Pixelbook has a better trackpad experience than my M1 Macbook and it runs on Linux (ChromeOS).

The big problem is a lack of investment by either Linux or Windows. It's such a huge quality of life improvement that I really don't understand why there's not more focus.

The real downer on Linux for me (chromebook aside) is that it's hard to get good laptop battery life and even with all the tweaks, it generally still isn't as good as my macbook.

I'd give KDE and Okular a look. There are some rough edges, but I find myself missing it when I'm on my mac.

All my desktops run Linux though as it's a beast there.

Does the trackpad usability steeply decline when you switch from ChromeOS to, say, Ubuntu?

I've never dual-booted my pixelbook, but using Crostini doesn't affect the trackpad because it is using ChromeOS as the host.

I've heard that GalliumOS (based on Xbuntu) uses the ChromeOS trackpad drivers and works well, but I've never had the time to mess with it.

I recently upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 on my Thinkpad T490 and there are noticeable trackpad improvements. Maybe it reset my settings or maybe there are driver improvements, I’m not 100% sure. Either way the default out of the box experience is faster and snappier.

Still not on the same level as MacBooks though. But it is making progress.

My Lenovo Flex 5 with Fedora 34 (GNOME) has an incredibly smooth trackpad experience. Also, GNOME sushi is a useful preview.app alternative, maybe not on the same level, but you should try it. I used Xfce before getting my new laptop, but on newish hardware, GNOME is great.

GNOME’s equivalent of Preview.app would be evince, which is strictly inferior to Preview, but for one singular feature: the hand tool.

In fact, GNOME is in fact my daily driver and I keep a Windows VM tucked away in case I ever need to manipulate a PDF. And even that is worse than Preview.

I have one of those (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2021/08/26/1400) but Elementary doesn’t let me do triple-finger drag. Can you do that with GNOME Shell?

It still baffles my mind that opening PDFs in Windows 10 just opens Edge

Like they couldn't have built in a PDF reader/editor?

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