Comment by car12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by car12 | Hacker News Reader

While I haven't used a system76 Thelio, while we're discussing System76, I can speak about a Galago pro that I bought from system76.

Noteworthy, because I was one of those Mac refugees who needed a non-mac machine now that I don't like the new macbook keyboards or insane price bump that macs got.

I bought a 16 GB Ram, 14" Galago pro with 512 GB SSD with Ubuntu on it. Battery life is around 2 hours. Not too good compared to a macbook.

- Keyboard is pretty nice, each key has a comfortable travel to it.

- The trackpad is awful or at least compared to what I'd gotten used to using the macbook for last many years. The trackpad feels rough, is not as responsive or smoother as the mac touchpad either. The click buttons aren't too nice to click either.

Bottom line is that the next time I need to buy another Linux laptop, I'll be looking to try out the newer System76 to make sure they've fixed their touchpad, if not, I'll go with Dell XPS developer edition, no questions asked.

Surprisingly, the touchpad being what it is, I've not seen it mentioned in the reviews of Galago pro all that much, I suspect it's because there are not too many ex-mac owners buying these, the touchpad feels like it belongs to year 2008.

If anyone knows of a trackpad that's even 90% as good as the MacBook ones I'd love to give them a try.

This is honestly one of the biggest things locking me into the Mac ecosystem, I haven't found an alternative trackpad that even comes close. I even like Apple's new MacBook keyboards (even with them breaking all the time… at least they fix them).

Presently, no trackpad under linux will give an OSX-like experience.

This is mostly a software limitation with the linux desktop IMO... e.g. web browsers like chrome and firefox lack basic features like kinetic scrolling under linux:

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=763791

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1213601

And linux desktops don't really have any kind of gesture integration (the only one I'm aware of is gnome on wayland, and it basically only has one gesture available, switching desktops)

I prefer using linux on my laptop, but this is definitely a big annoyance

Our copywriter was force-switched to a new Darter for several days (he was previously a Mac user too) and said he really loves the trackpad on it, so that's definitely work looking at. He cited things like the finger tracking and the smoothness of the surface as top reasons. That, combined with the 6-7 hour working battery life make that a really compelling machine.

I have the same build. Largely I'm satisfied, but I agree with your touchpad woes. I found after I turned the sensitivity of the touchpad up to max, it didn't feel so bad.

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