Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing?

Re:Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? by HeadsUpHigh on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @08:55AM (#17549338)

Absolutely no. I never liked the macbook touchpad. I tried using it a couple times. It really felt like they had to shoehorn every action into a gesture to the point where a lot of them felt extremely cumbersome. For example it took me a few tries until I managed to tile windows.

I'm using a regular non-luxury laptop. I'm mostly using it with a mouse because the trackpad goes off every now and then( it's a hardware issue). But when it works it's fine. Cursor tracking is good with no artificial accel etc( meaning it goes exactly where I ask it to go), two finger scrolling works... The only complain is that pinch to zoom doesn't work and that the default button arrangement is a bit cumbersome.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? by dilap on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @09:03AM (#17549389)

I think you're definitely a special case. For me the MacBook touchpad is my favorite input method, better than even a mouse -- because it's very precise, and the gestures are very handy!

Generally, most people are very fond of mac touchpads.

So, I'd say from a linux strategic perspective, or the perspectie of the greater good, the answer is yes!

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? by pmontra on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @09:15AM (#17549480)

I'm another special case. The only good thing of the mac touchpad is pinch to zoom integrated into many applications. I really don't want gestures. Scrolling and moving the pointer on my HP laptops always worked really well. Maybe it's a HP thing. However I remeber that the same touchpad worked much better with Ubuntu 8.04 than with Windows XP. Two finger scrolling instead of scrolling along the edge, among the other things.

I disable clicking on the touchpad and I use the 3 hardware buttons because they're much better at being buttons and how would I middle click and paste with a touchpad? Plus maybe the cursor nudge from the article. No, the touchpad won't sell me a Mac.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? by dilap on Tuesday July 17, 2018 @08:01PM (#17554584)

Someone needs to make a "touchpad olympics" so we can see who is really more nimble ;-)

But yeah, these things can definitely be pretty personal. Also, you get used to one thing and it can be very jarring to use something else.

But man I've never used any PC that even felt close to me. And I used to use PC notebooks -- switching to mac was immediately a "holy shit, I'm not plugging in a mouse anymore" moment for me. I've used a couple HP notebooks but nothing recently. Maybe it's gotten better...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux touchpad like a Macbook: goal worth pursuing? by HeadsUpHigh on Wednesday July 18, 2018 @01:31PM (#17560342)

I really don't know. I'd like more trackpad "resolution" so I can disable or throttle acceleration down in order to get more precision but I definitely don't want a huge trackpad like the new macbooks or the artificial cursor movement both windows and mac have. Also the trackpoint on thinkpads works pretty well in my limited experience.

[ Parent | on HN ]