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Comment by unfocused | Hacker News Reader

Interesting timing for this article.

I'm in Canada, and for the first time in over a decade, I decided I couldn't pay the premium of $3200 (taxes included) for a Macbook Pro with 512GB SSD and 16GB of RAM.

I bought a Lenovo 2 in 1 touch laptop with lots of ports, and an AMD Ryzen 3700U with RX Vega 10 graphics, for $700 (taxes included).

The AMD Ryzen 3700U is just as good as the 8th Gen i5. Plenty for me at home. And with the money I saved, I can upgrade my NAS.

This combination of AMD + Windows + Lenovo has finally pushed me to try the world outside of Apple.

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Check out WSL. I’m of the opinion it was created specifically for web devs in your situation.

After all, what really is a MacBook to a web dev besides a off-the-shelf reliable laptop with a Unix terminal?

Similarly, I got a thinkpad x395 with the 3700U.

On Linux (Arch's current kernel), everything* works.

*I haven't looked into the IR camera nor the fingerprint reader, but the latter supposedly has a driver, as per Arch wiki's thinkpad support page.

How's the trackpad? I have heard people say that they've found an apple comparable trackpad, but I have yet to encounter one.

I switched to ThinkPads last year (first a X250, now T470s) and this was my big concern too. I just sat down one day and spent an hour or so tweaking the various options for the trackpad driver until I got it how I was used to from Apple. I'd say it's 95% as good, and some things like dragging are infact easier as there are physical mouse buttons (as well as tap to click).

I have no idea why the defaults are so bad, but I've kind of got used to that as a Linux user ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Can you detail your distro and the tool you used to tweak? What settings worked well?

> and some things like dragging are infact easier as there are physical mouse buttons

Did you ever try the 3-finger drag on a Mac? I find it hard to imagine any button being easier than that.

It’s a shame Apple hides it in Accessibility. That gesture is wonderful.

I use a $250 mouse + a $250 mechanical keyboard as the laptop is docked... Pretty sure nothing compares to apples track pads. At the same time sitting hunched over a laptop on a desk is sub optimal too, many do it. Point is for significantly less money a non apple device is most likely gonna get the job done and not be a disaster hardware wise. Is the Trackpad really worth $2,000?

Whats the 250$ mouse?

Btw not sure why you compare trackpad to a mouse. People who commute or work from cafes need good trackpad and apple ones are the best. The trackpad itself costs much less but i doubt people would use it as mouse replacement in office situations.

FWIW, I use Apple’s trackpad exclusively in office or on the road. The gestures and tap to click are irreplaceable for me.

Apple's trackpads are good (although overly large these days) but their keyboards are utterly horrific so it depends what you prioritise. If you mainly consume media and browse the web, then the apple's input is optimised for that case.

If you write or code or otherwise do real work, then something like a thinkpad has input better optimised around that.

Keyboards seems a pretty individual thing. I like Apple keyboards (even the touchbar ones), and think their standalone desktop keyboards are the best keyboards for programmers available.

Apple keyboards either lead to a weird feeling in the finger joints or make you type on the keyboard as if you had a nailjob with a huge extension.

But if I had to pick a keyboard I never actually have to type on myself - I would pick the Apple keyboard 100% of the time.

Any Synaptics multi-touch trackpad feels as good as Apple. Apple hardware is nothing special.

It's all about the software. Scrolling in Firefox on Wayland with the upcoming vsync patch (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1542808) and OpenGL layer compositing enabled feels perfect. (Fun fact, I actually contributed the inertial scrolling on GTK patch to Firefox :D)

If you run legacy software and your trackpad scrolling is delivered to the application as emulated scroll wheel events, don't be surprised that it doesn't feel right.

It's shipping as I type this and should have it this week. I'll update this thread since I've been using a Macbook Pro trackpad for 10+ years now and give you a first impression.

Ok, so after using for a couple of hours, the trackpad feels great! In fact, side by side they are identical in size with the Macbook Pro 2013. Clearly copied the size from Apple, but the feel is fine. The keyboard feels a bit different, but you get used it.

I also did not change any setting on the trackpad. This is out of the box.

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