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Comment by macco | Hacker News Reader

Why they have this bad touchpads is beyond me. Then it would be better to ditch them completely and position the keyboard nearer to the user.

Like tho good Linux support though.

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My work ThinkPad (Carbon X1 gen 8)'s touchpad is fine. The gestures work fine with Fedora. The touchpad wasn't a downgrade after coming from a work MBP running OSX.

In some ways it's better because I can use 3 finger click to close tabs and open links in new tabs.

Unlike in the article, I'm not a fan of the fingerprint reader. It rarely recognises me and (at least on fedora) I need to try it a few times before it will fall back to letting me type my password.

Thinkpad P52 here. Touchpad is good. Better than on my work MacBook Pro (2019) actually and very similar to touchpad on my own Air (2015).

I have a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 1 and the trackpad works great in Manjaro and Windows. I donno what the post is complaining about.

Many Synaptic touchpads don't have proper gesture support in X11. They work out of the box in Wayland, but on X11 gestures are meh even if you can get them to work. You can use a tool to execute commands on certain gestures, but you don't get the immediate response or the ability to pause halfway through.

The author bought a model that can come with an Nvidia GPU so I'm guessing they might be on X11. That could explain their problems.

> Why they have this bad touchpads is beyond me. Then it would be better to ditch them completely and position the keyboard nearer to the user.

I think some brands have tried this (like ones that include a mechanical keyboard or a screen) and the feedback about having the keyboard closer to the user and not having a "shelf" you can wrest your wrists on is almost always negative. YMMV.

I've been very happy with both my P1 and Carbon touchpads. Not as customizable as a mac's (using BTT) out of the box, but the feel is fine. Much better than the Dell XPS I'm writing this from, dragging anything is literally impossible.

I have a P53 as my personal device and trackpad works great, but the P15s for work is garbage. It jumps all over the place at times and even feels worse as in not smooth enough.

> Then it would be better to ditch them completely and position the keyboard nearer to the user.

I'll need to carry a palm rest as well then.

I’m reluctant to let go of my X220 for exactly this reason. On typing-heavy/pointer-minimal tasks, the keyboard and wrist rest ergonomics are basically perfect. To the point where I made a wrist rest for my desktop keyboard out of carved pine wrapped with leather that precisely matches the X220 geometry.

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