Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bxparks | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Two thumbs up for the MBA11. I use mine every day for everything non-programming. I liked it so much that I bought another one on eBay. I keep one plugged in, then swap out the other one when the battery goes low. I use Syncthing to synchronize useful files between the two. The full-size keyboard on them is wonderful. And the 2x USB-A ports, the mini-DP port, and the 3.5mm headphone jack. Awesome.

I tried running Linux/Ubutunu on them, but I gave up. The fan did not work out of the box, requiring a patch. Sleep on lid-closing was broken, requiring a hack. But the critical thing that made me give up on Linux was the broken trackpad. Palm rejection is terrible on Linux, and Linux has no support for pinch-zooming. I cannot live without pinch-zooming on a Mac, especially on an 11" screen.

When Apple stops supporting Big Sur (my MBA11 2013) and Catalina (my MBA11 2015), I'll try OpenCore Legacy Patcher. If that doesn't work, I'll probably just keep using the old MacOS versions.

I'm running OLCP'd Ventura on MBA11 2014. Works just fine. Sonoma should be supported too, but haven't tried yet.

>Linux has no support for pinch-zooming

On Apple hardware, or in general? Because I pinch-zoomed on your comment in Firefox on Linux.

On my Dell Latitude and Precision laptops, pinch-zooming does not work at all on Linux (Mint 21, MATE or Cinammon, w/ Firefox).

On the MBA11, I was slightly imprecise with that statement. I recall that pinch-zooming was bound to Ctrl+ on Firefox. But that is not what pinch-zooming does on MacOS. On MacOS, the zoom level remains unchanged (e.g. 170% for Hacker News) but the window content is smoothly zoomed in and out, without re-rendering the text or images. The zooming is so smooth and responsive that it feels like it's doing fractional percentages. There is almost no input lag from the movement of the fingers.

The Ctrl+ action, on the other hand, changes in discrete steps, (e.g. 100%, 110%, 125%, etc), and there is a noticeable lag caused by the rendering of the window content using the new zoom level. I find the Ctrl+ action to be unusable. (Addendum: On some web pages, I see an image that is too small. So I hit Ctrl+, which causes the image to become smaller. Argh. Pinch-zoom on MacOS causes the image to become bigger, because it doesn't change the zoom-level.)

For what it's worth, you can get the smooth behavior in Firefox by running it with "MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1". It's silly that it's not default, but it's there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com