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Comment by ghqst | Hacker News Reader

Haptic trackpads are the secret sauce that make MacBooks so pleasant to use. You probably want one.

It's a matter of preferences. Actually I like trackpads that don't mind and have physical buttons. The separation between the surface that moves the pointer on screen and the surfaces that generate the clicks means that there are no misclicks and no involuntary pointer movements while clicking.

The MacBook software is so good that I’ve never had issues with misclicks or movement despite your palms sitting on it while typing.

Long ago I installed Linux on a MacBook and found it unusable because of clicks and movement while typing. It’s probably improved these days though.

It is so incredibly "weird" to press on a MacBook (non Neo) trackpad when it is off, it's like touching a dead thing.

I had palm rejection work perfectly in my 2015 laptop; for my 2022 laptop, I had to switch to Fedora for the latest software.

Spoken like someone who has never used a haptic trackpad.

Haptic schmaptic, I just want my Framework's enormous trackpad to respect deadzones and stop detecting my palms. I had to entirely disable tap-to-click, because nothing else would work.

I might have to try their preinstalled Ubuntu images or something and see if there's some secret sauce in the input configs.

How about this https://community.frame.work/t/palm-rejection/40069/23?page=...

> For Linux libinput “Disable While Typing” (DWT) problems, this page claims libinput will only use the DWT setting if the keyboard and touchpad are either both identified as internal devices, or are both identified as the same device.

sudo nano /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks

[Framework Touchpad Fix] MatchName=* MatchUdevType=touchpad AttrKeyboardIntegration=internal

There is no accounting for taste. For instance, I still prefer discrete buttons over tap-clicks or multi-finger-taps, but I would accept the mild annoyance of tap clicks over the pressing down the pad itself.

Is the software that makes them so pleasant to use available on Linux?

Not a huge fan of the "force touch" trackpads on newer macs, the old man yells at the clouds. In all seriousness though I have used a pre force touch MacBook not too long ago and I prefer that experience a lot over the new one I have from work. Though the larger size of these trackpads is something I really like and where neither the older MacBook nor the the current non-pro Framework 13 come close.

Me, neither! I just had someone suggest to me yesterday that I was "holding it wrong" for preferring a real click mechanism on my trackpads.

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