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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused what this is trying to achieve. In my four years of Linux usage, I have had no complaints about the touchpad[0].

[0] Other than the issue where sometimes my touchpad requires an extra finger touch to work after resuming from suspend, but I have a hunch that is a hardware/firmware issue. In fact, I seem to recall that happening on a Windows machine once.

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Same here. ThinkPad user for years, never had any issues. Whenever I help a friend with a MacBook I often feel like I cannot control the touchpad and so I ask the friend to do the clicking. I think the whole story here is people moving from Apple to Linux and wanting things to feel exactly the same.

Have you lived with a Macbook for a while? People who do generally feel pain when using any other trackpad afterwards. They are just much better. Feel more responsive. It becomes second nature and ingrained in your nerve pathways. Other trackpads feel wrong after getting used to a Macbook trackpad. They accelerate wrong.

As someone who has had multiple vendors with Ubuntu and Fedora installed, and having a work macbook, I can tell you the trackpad experience is much better on Apple. To me, it's the same user experience as going from a 60 hz screen to a 120 hz screen smoother animation, more immediate response, and better " intuitive " acceleration.

Same here and on my laptops I don't need the extra finger touch. It just works.

I have had a work MPB for years and while the touchpad is nice I just use the other touchpads with no problems.

Then again as I like bigger displays I use an external keyboard and mouse when not traveling.

I find this project really confusing, as well. I'm sure sure this project is doing some good work, but I'd love if they take the time to catch us up a little bit, or maybe tweak their name to better reflect what it is they're actually doing. Like, for a modern Linux desktop on well supported modern hardware, what is this affecting?

From my perspective as someone who is rather picky about pixel perfect scrolling and animations, and happily using GNOME 45 with a Magic Touchpad, a Logitech mouse, and a Thinkpad touchpad, and finding nothing particularly amiss with any of those[0] … I'm, um, lost.

Is this all about backporting things to X11? I'm unfamiliar with how touchpads are over there nowadays. (Frankly that sounds like a waste of time to me, but if it still makes people happy, that's cool). Or has this project been actively contributing to exactly those things I'm using, and I just didn't realize?

[0] The Magic Touchpad is definitely a better experience than the Thinkpad one, but they both support multi-finger gestures, and Gtk apps correctly do pixel-perfect scrolling with kinetics and all that jazz. Could maybe do a better job doing the right thing when I lift my finger after scrolling at low speeds. If I used more apps with different toolkits, I know I'd be annoyed by the differences in behaviour between them, so there's definitely something missing there. Happily, since somewhat recently, pretty much every app I use supportsGtk 4 apps all support pixel-perfect scrolling with smooth scroll wheels, too, which is pretty cool.

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