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Comment by redundantly | Hacker News Reader

I welcome any and all improvements to touchpads on Linux and Windows systems. Switching from my personal MacBook to my work ThinkPad is like traveling back in time in terms of usability.

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I always thought it was strange that people went through the inconveniences of plugging a mouse into their laptop when there was a trackpad right there until I had to use a Windows system and saw just how bad it was.

I have an Apple Magic Trackpad, which I use with my laptop and external monitor. There is no way I'm going to suffer the ergonomic hell that is a laptop for a second longer than I absolutely have to. It's great to be able to take your laptop with you, but it's not a device suited for hours of use.

It's also illegal to work on a laptop, without external peripherals and monitor, so you need a pointing device anyway.

> There is no way I'm going to suffer the ergonomic hell that is a laptop for a second longer than I absolutely have to

I agree with this, but intentionally choosing a trackpad to put on your desk is just accepting a portion of this hell, in my opinion. The trackpad is an RSI torture device to me, because of the way you have to hold the muscles in the back of your hand tense so all but one finger is a little higher than the others.

On the flip side, one of my colleagues was overjoyed when Apple released the Magic Trackpad, because it's worlds better for her to use with her arthritis than any kind of mouse she's tried.

For me it's either a trackpad or a trackball. I find that any pain comes from moving my wrist and the Magic Trackpad is large enough that I move my entire arm and not the wrist.

It's great that we have options, so that people can pick what works for them. It is a little sad that Apple is pretty much the only option for an "external" trackpad though.

Back in the 90s I had a 102-key keyboard with a built in trackpad (and dual PS2 connectors to hook up to the PC) that was actually pretty nice—except if I tried using the trackpad when my fingers were damp in which case it was hell. I bought it in anticipation of moving to a laptop (which didn’t actually happen for another 5 years), but it was the first step in my becoming a trackpad aficionado.

You and me both. A friend introduced me to vertical mice. I regretted the purchase for the first hour, then came to kind of like it, and now you couldn’t pry it away from me.

I just want the integrated touchpad of my Dell Latitude 9330 to work decently. The libinput driver is just crap with this model, to the point that I have to connect an Apple Magic Trackpad, and that works great. Synaptic driver works better for the internal one, but apparently it is old and deprecated and everybody writes that we should not be using that.

Was the Thinkpad running Windows? I find Linux (Debian distro running Wayland) on Thinkpads to be exceptionally good -- on par with (and in fact I would dare say better than) MacOS on Mac hardware.

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