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Comment by seszett | Hacker News Reader

I've been reading this kind of opinion for years, but I have always found the touchpad to be annoyingly slow under macOS.

On the other hand, MacBooks are basically the only laptops with a large enough touchpad to be comfortable, I don't know if there's some other secret sauce Apple algorithm in the firmware that contributes to the experience, but to me the perfect combination is with a MacBook running Linux, which is what I've been using for about 12 years now.

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I think I'll have to watch one of these people who love the Mac touchpad work. We are clearly not working the same way. Even with max speed and acceleration my MacBook air m2 touchpad feel anemic, and cumbersome for selecting text.

Fwiw I also have an apple mouse, and the touch based scroll feels unpredictable, and the mouse a bit slow too.

When I select text with the trackpad, which isn't all that often, I'll usually double-click on the first word and drag, so I don't need to be very precise. Or triple-click if I need the whole paragraph. When editing text or code I almost always navigate and select using the keyboard, but I do that regardless of the pointer device I'm using.

I never find the speed and acceleration of the Apple Trackpads slow. Out of curiosity, how are you moving your fingers when you want the mouse to travel long distances? What I do is repetitions of the movement on same area of the trackpad , e.g. my finger never drags more than two inches of the surface. I also have tap to click disabled, and use my middle finger to move, thumb to do left click, and middle + ring finger for right click.

I think you're using it wrong. You can travel a whole screen with one trackpad move if you move the finger fast enough. Maybe you didn't hit a high enough acceleration?

Also when "holding" a window or icon?

When I have my laptop plugged into a 38" ultrawide monitor, I occasionally need to use more than one motion to get a window from the far side of the ultrawide monitor over and down to the laptop's built-in screen. But that doesn't feel too slow to me; rather, it's just that I'm moving the window a pretty large distance. For more reasonable distances, I have no trouble dragging windows or files around. I usually have my cursor speed set two ticks above default (leaving three faster settings available on the slider).

The cursor moves the same way, it's just a bit harder because you can't let go of the cursor and start over from the corner of the touchpad with more room to move once you've pressed. But thanks to acceleration, you can move fast towards e.g. the left, slowly move back to the right (covering a much shorter distance), then move fast back left to finish the travel, if you missed it the first time.

Thank you for explaining how you work. But kinda sounds like a workaround?

> MacBooks are basically the only laptops with a large enough touchpad to be comfortable

This is surprisingly tough to google, but apparently at least some Apple laptop touchpads are 13cm wide, and my Framework 13" touchpad is 11.5x7.66cm (and making it any taller would increase the size of the whole chassis).

Just measured a stand-alone, a 2020-era macbook pro 13” and a M1 Air. The pro and stand-alone are 13cm and the air is 12cm wide. For depth, the stand-alone is closer to square though at 11cm while the laptops both seem to be around 8cm or so.

Likewise. There's something about MacOS's touchpad handling that makes it impossible to get it to feel good for me. The default Gnome settings on a Mac touchpad feel perfect.

KDE's defaults feel great on Magic Trackpad 2 as well, I prefer it with acceleration disabled. That said I'm using GNOME right now and it handles great on a multitouch trackpad.

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