I've been eyeing the Apple trackpads for some time now, as the experience of their trackpads are like no other (for laptops at least). How well does the standalone trackpad work with Windows and Linux? Those are my main OSes I switch between, and it's very nice that mouse input is exactly the same for both so muscle memory works perfectly well, would the same be true for using a Apple trackpad?

I recently got the Apple Magic Trackpad 2 for use on linux. I use it on the left side of my keyboard, so my right hand isn't taking all the RSI wear from using a mouse.

Overall, it works very well. It's basically plug-and-play. I only use it wired (with the included lightning-to-usbc cable), so I can't speak for the bluetooth experience.

I'm using KDE5 on xorg 7.7, and the multi-touch features work fine (two- and three-finger click). I haven't tried setting up gestures (three-finger swipe, etc) yet, so I'm not sure how well those work.

One issue is kinetic scrolling, where the page keeps scrolling with inertia after your input (like on a phone, or on macs). Without this, two-finger swipe scrolling will just emulate sending individual scroll wheel clicks to the app, which I find very unsatisfying.

At least on my setup, kinetic scrolling doesn't work by default. Maybe more bleeding-edge distros, or Wayland, or GTK DEs have better support for this -- not sure. I got firefox to support it by starting it with MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1. Chrome, Libreoffice, Konsole, and other apps still use the scrollwheel-type behavior. I haven't really spent much time looking into kinetic scrolling for them. I think this is probably the biggest drawback, but my impression is that it's not specific to the Apple Trackpad.

I’ve only ever used the Apple trackpad with a Mac.

The Fingerworks trackpad worked great with Windows. Basically you map gestures to keyboard shortcuts (it came with a bunch out of the box), so anything you can do with key combos, you can do with gestures instead: app switching, opening and closing things, cut/copy/paste, etc.

I switched back from the Magic Trackpad to an ergonomic mouse, because I got pretty bad carpal tunnel syndrome after a few months of usage.

Yeah agreed. Just being able to throw your hand at the Trackpad and start a cursor move anywhere, rather than carefully grab a mouse, is huge.

I use BetterTouchTool to add extra gestures to move windows to different places on my monitor. It feels like magic and any time someone’s watching me they ask how I’m doing that.