My experience was that my trackpads worked perfectly with 12.04 and 14.04, but in 16.04 they changed the driver to... something that uses 'synclient' to adjust

My experience was that my trackpads worked perfectly with 12.04 and 14.04, but in 16.04 they changed the driver to... something that uses 'synclient' to adjust parameters. And this was a disaster; there are some 60 params that affect operation, and many of them have completely non-working defaults (like you sweep your finger across the touchpad and it randomly selects stuff). I tried for weeks to try and find some synclient settings that made my trackpad work as well as it did in 12.04, to no avail. I have another machine still running 14.04 (don't ask) and the trackpad still works perfectly. I tried posting on StackExchange, but I am apparently the only person (besides you?) that cares about Linux support for trackpads, or has trouble with the support in the current driver. So yes, I'll second your comment about Linux on the desktop.