Comment by dbevv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbevv | Hacker News Reader

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I dislike using touchpads very much. I go to great lengths to control everything with the keyboard, and fall back to a traditional mouse when I have to (I tried trackballs but I couldn't adapt). Whenever I'm forced to use a touchpad because I'm on the go or I don't have room to bring a mouse with me, I groan.

That said, the implementation of the touchpad in a Macbook vs a regular touchpad in even a high end laptop is night and day. The software and hardware work together to make sure the touch surface is centered, and your fingers glide through it, there are no accidental presses, and esentially never misinput. The haptic feedback is so good that you can't really tell that you're not pressing a button. In comparison, the touchpad in what I consider the best Windows laptop, the Lenovo X1 Carbon, is a steaming pile of shit, and fails every measure.

I don't know how much of it is Apple's attention to detail versus their ability to do vertical integration -- Lenovo likely has very little control over how Synaptics implements their drivers -- but I would pay a hefty premium for an experience like a Macbook.

But there's one giant flaw on MacBook touchpads. After hearing everyone drool over them and finally getting to try one ( newly issued corporate laptop), I'm shocked that you can't independently control the scroll direction of the touchpad and mouse scroll button. There's an option in both submenus ( touchpad and mouse), but they change the same setting, resulting in a really unintuitive (for me) setup. Where's Apple's attention to detail here? Why do you have two different toggles in two different menus change each other? Why are you forced the same way on two completely different devices with different UX?

You can use third party tools and i believe command line to do this.

It's maddening how many third party apps with huge permissions one needs to get a macOS device to be customisable, like a keylogger for even basic keyboard shortcut customisations.

No amount of touch pad excellence erases the deficit of no tiling window manager and focus follows mouse in Linux. I recently upgraded to an M1 Macbook from an HP laptop running Ubuntu at work… and I’m having serious regrets.

I recall discussing focus follows mouse with a colleague on macOS years ago, did they really remove the feature?

Fingers crossed that the Asahi Linux project keeps advancing as good as they have.

I'm the same way and I'm mortified whenever I have the displeasure to use some PC or Chromebook laptop trackpad. PC manufacturers today still can't figure out how to make a trackpad as good as what Apple had 20 years ago.

Though part of it is thanks to apple themselves, for having a patent on that. Fortunately some company did find another way to reproduce this click feel through haptics and it will hopefully appear soon in other manufacturers’ laptops.

Even trackpads that were actually clicking were still miles ahead to what I have in my latest generation HP bullsh*t

But the most important thing with Apple trackpad is not the haptics imo. If Apple went back to regular buttons tomorrow I wouldn't care at all. The tracking itself is light years ahead of any competition. This is still one of the big things keeping me from using Linux (even on Macbooks). Tracking and scrolling is just unbearable. (Yes I tried that driver, the other library, the recommended macos like settings, custom settings... I spent a LONG time trying to have something decent. Nothing is even remotely close.)

Just for the record, may I ask you when did you try last? Libinput which wayland uses heavily improves on the previous drivers, but I agree it still won’t be as good as osx’s.

It was last summer. I bought one of the recommended laptops for running Linux just for the purpose of switching. It sucked hard.

(rant following so please don't read the rest if you don't like ranting about linux desktop)

I could probably live with trackpad not being great. But the sound stack, bluetooth stack, driving displays with different dpi (hidpi and non-hidpi) etc. are all terrible. Managing multiple displays (xrandr, xinerama etc.) even without the dpi difference is also just bad. If you like to tinker it's great but I just couldn't make the switch. It didn't give me the confidence that it will work when I need it. I tried all major distros and read almost the entirety of the arch wiki (it is so good). i3 is one of the things that would make me try again in the future. There is nothing like it on macos (some wms try but they always feel duct-taped). And systemd is good.

If you ever would give it another try, I highly recommend sway, which is almost completely compatible with i3’s config and basically a wayland clone of that. Wayland makes multiple displays with different DPIs possible and basically a huge, much needed revamp on all the technical debt that accumulated in a multi-decade old graphics stack.

Similarly, pipewire is pretty much stable now, which fixes both the sound and bluetooth stack singlehandedly.

Thank you. My day to day work involves sharing screen on calls a lot. While I know it's possible to some extent with pipewire, it is still too hacky and too much effort for a simple(from an end-user standpoint) task. Afaik it still doesn't work with Zoom at all. But I am in general excited about Wayland.

I believe it works well with the browser version now (as it uses the correct APIs) but afaik browser zoom doesn’t have feature parity with the desktop one?

So fair enough for not trying it out just yet, hopefully soon we can just easily say that it works splendidly!

Well said. The Macbook touchpad is almost good enough to get me to use it without being mad. And that's a hell of an accomplishment, because for any other laptop, I'd prefer to simply not use the computer if I didn't have a mouse on me.

This so much, the Mac touchpad is almost perfect, still no other manufacturer can compete, its really night and day. With all other systems I immediately switch to a mouse if possible.

It was actually perfect in my 2015 MBP, now its a tad too bad and its hard to find good resting positions for the fingers and palms.

too bad -> too big, typo

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