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Comment by sapphire_tomb | Hacker News Reader

I see this comment about how awesome Apple Trackpads are all the time here, and just assumed I was missing out because I'd never used a MacBook. But I got given a MacBook Pro recently for work, and I'm super underwhelmed. The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.

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> The trackpad on it is no better or worse than any other trackpad I've used.

Compared to the thinkpad trackpad, it is light-years ahead. It is also more robust - functions with a little bit of dirt/oil/dirt/water. Get some oil on the thinkpad trackpad and you need to spend 10 mins wiping it away for it to work without driving you nuts.

Even hardcore thinkpad fans have grudgingly admitted to the superiority of the Macbook trackpad. Check the thinkpad forums to see their envy.

Part of their magic is the integration with the operating system in the form of gestures. Their UI for discovering those used to be stellar; every gesture had a little video preview. Right now I'd describe it as just okay. Check the 'trackpad gestures' section in system settings, or this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102482

The gestures are there in KDE already https://github.com/NayamAmarshe/ToucheggKDE

Touchegg kinda sucks (gestures are not 1:1 but rather just "triggered"), and you also don't need it. KDE and Gnome (as well as some WMs like Niri) have native touchpad gesture support on Wayland. Using my touchpad for history navigation also works flawlessly on Firefox with two fingers (essentially just horizontal scrolling).

I’m sure they manage to hit 120fps smoothly too just like MacOS? …

I find it worse, because it's far too big for me... the thinkpad T series one is acceptable.

What I'd want in a hack laptop is a full size TKL keyboard (and full height, or close), with a trackpoint (or 2 -- add one near the arrow keys).

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