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Comment by k1rcher | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. I’m running PopOS on my framework, running Wayland— the touchpad gestures is very good. But still not up to par with MacBook. I’m extremely curious as to how this compares.

I think it’s both PopOS’s gestures as well as the hardware (the framework touchpad is quite good!) that has resulted in such a fantastic experience, at least compared to other laptop touchpads I’ve used. Definitely the closest to MacBook gestures I’ve experienced.

I’m working on getting an eGPU setup going so I can properly run X instead of Wayland, and am very excited to try this out.

(Please correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is Wayland if you’re running integrated graphics, X if you have a GPU)

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Wow, we are very similar! Running PopOS on a new framework laptop and loving it. Agree it is good but not up to par with MacBook. I set up linuxtouchpad.org if you're interested in dropping by the forum or chat channel.

It seems incredible to me that Linux, and even Windows, is still trying to figure out how to make a trackpad experience on par with what Apple offered 15+ years ago.

Well, they've had to support about 100x more devices than Apple does. Conversely, it's incredible that Apple still hasn't figured out how to get Vulkan running on their handful of supported hardware.

The difference here is that Apple doesn't want Vulkan rendering, because they have their own special graphics stack that they want everyone else to use instead. The Linux and Windows folks want good touchpad support and work is being done to improve it.

I must say that the touchpad support on Windows is pretty great if the vendor bothered to implement the right type of driver (the recent driver model, I think it's called "high precision" or something?) but many touchpad vendors don't do that and instead ship simple drivers based on their old code base and call it a day.

On the Linux side it's just a capacity problem that won't go away any time soon. This project seems to be the only group of people in the Linux community that cares enough to take the huge amount of time to re-write and re-design the software stack to accept better gestures, and even with their dedication it's been taking them a while (understandably so!).

You can use X11 session with integrated graphics as well.

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