4 ms·

I feel your pain. Ubuntu Desktop was my preferred go to distro not too long ago. Using 16.10 was nice and I managed to get the touchpad working in a reasonable

I feel your pain. Ubuntu Desktop was my preferred go to distro not too long ago. Using 16.10 was nice and I managed to get the touchpad working in a reasonable way with xinput. Then 18 came along and everything went to hell. All the properties changed and some even disappeared. And of course the ones missing were the ones I actually needed to make my touchpad work in a way that it was comfortable to use. After that I just jumped ship. I didn't wanted to spend another week to figure out everything again. I happily choose Linux when it comes to servers and other non-desktop related work, but I am very disappointed how it lacks user friendliness and ease of use. 10-20 years back I would have said, that laptops are a niche platform and that's why it has a hard time supporting hardware. But it's 2018 and laptops are becoming mainstream in everyday use. Not being able to support the primary pointing hardware on a platform so popular is a death sentence. And don't get me started on discrete GPUs...

trash_panda 8y ago
Reading this thread makes me wonder if I live in the same universe as HN. I'm amazed at the level of exquisiteness of the requirements of the HN crowd. I mean, I've been using computers all my life and used almost every Linux, Windows and OS X systems. I do get that Macbook touchpads are god-tier and unrivaled so far by other hardware manufacturers. That being said, I rather have my old Lenovo x220 with an external mouse. No touchpad is as good as a decent external mouse (decent != expensive, mine is $30). If you want to see an abysmal differences between touchpads, compare a Macbook one with the Lenovo's X220 touchpad. The X220 is the worst touchpad I've ever used, but it is still my main computer and I love it. People talk about Mac's build quality, when I think they should be referring to its industrial design, which I get is very appealing to the senses. Now, the X220 has serious build quality. You couln't break it if you wanted to, and if you do break it, almost every part is < $100 on eBay and easy to repair. My point is the following, and as other commenter said; I think people choose Macs before they like it better, it suits their image and are willing to pay their pricetag. I know people need to justify their choices as if Macs are the only objective solution that fits their use cases, but I find this hard to believe. I understand that everyone has its valid reasons behinds every choice they make, but what bothers me (I know it shouldn't but who cares) is when that people bash on Linux and other hardware manufacturers just because they don't LIKE that OS/computer. I don't LIKE macOS/Macs and I don't them, that doesn't mean they are not good systems. I just CHOOSE to not use them because MY reasons. Nowadays most systems offer more than acceptable user experiences out of the box, whether its a Linux/Windows/macOS box on whatever hardware. The thing is that people get really picky and justify their decisions by diminishing other manufacturers/systems. I believe people are afraid to say "I bought a Mac because I like them! f* you!"
- jandrese 8y ago
  For the most part I've been reasonably happy with Linux touchpads (maybe I'm too accepting of less than a perfect experience?) except for one area: Palm rejection. When you have a giant touchpad it's absolutely necessary to have good working palm rejection, and I've seen far too many laptops completely fail to have palm rejection in Ubuntu. Sometimes you can get it working again by twiddling the mouse driver (enable/disable xinput for example), but sometimes it just plain never works. I've been all over StackExchange and similar places but on some laptops none of the proposed solutions work. I've opened bug reports, but it's hard for developers to fix it when they can't replicate the problem. Sometimes you only get half functionality, like the cursor won't move but it will still click, moving your text cursor to random places when the palm lightly brushes the touchpad and it registers as a click. On some laptops I just have to pack in a mouse and disable the touchpad entirely. That's not an acceptable solution. I'm really hoping that Ubuntu 18 avoids some of this nonsense.
  - MrLeftHand 8y ago
    For me Ubuntu 18 was worse then 16.10. A lot of properties I used to fine tune the touchpad with xinput were gone or changed. Was very disappointed. So if you haven't made the change yet, then you might want to stay on whatever you're on for the time being.
- na85 8y ago
  Where do you work that you have room to use a mouse? Coffee shops, planes, trains, passenger seat in a car, literally on my lap in waiting rooms or transit terminals, etc. This is where I use my laptop, and I don't have room for a mouse in these places.
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    A desk
  - innocenat 8y ago
    I put the mouse on my touchpad. Works well rnough
jandrese 8y ago
One baffling design decision Canonical made for 18 is defaulting some touchpads (ones without separate buttons) to "two finger click for right click", even though so many touchpads have a clicky area and even lines printed on the touchpad for right click. That's not the baffling part though, the baffling part is that they didn't put an option in the control panel to return the old behavior. You have to spin up dconf and find the right bit to twiddle to get the old behavior back. How is this user friendly? This is like 14 when they hid menu items by default (and replace them with absolutely nothing at all) causing newbies to be very confused as to how to use their apps. It only took a few times of very confused users being totally lost because they forgot they had to move their mouse up to the top to make the menu items reappear before I tracked down the dconf setting to turn it back on. It wasn't until 16 that they exposed that in the control panel, but even then it defaulted to "uselessly hide".
- abrowne 8y ago
  It's a GNOME change, not a Canonical one: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/04/gnome-328-uses-clickfinger-behaviour-by.html http://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/04/gnome-328-uses-clickfinger...
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Canonical had the final word on it. They could have reverted the default to the old behavior if they wanted.

trash_panda 8y ago

Reading this thread makes me wonder if I live in the same universe as HN. I'm amazed at the level of exquisiteness of the requirements of the HN crowd. I mean, I've been using computers all my life and used almost every Linux, Windows and OS X systems. I do get that Macbook touchpads are god-tier and unrivaled so far by other hardware manufacturers. That being said, I rather have my old Lenovo x220 with an external mouse. No touchpad is as good as a decent external mouse (decent != expensive, mine is $30). If you want to see an abysmal differences between touchpads, compare a Macbook one with the Lenovo's X220 touchpad. The X220 is the worst touchpad I've ever used, but it is still my main computer and I love it. People talk about Mac's build quality, when I think they should be referring to its industrial design, which I get is very appealing to the senses. Now, the X220 has serious build quality. You couln't break it if you wanted to, and if you do break it, almost every part is < $100 on eBay and easy to repair. My point is the following, and as other commenter said; I think people choose Macs before they like it better, it suits their image and are willing to pay their pricetag. I know people need to justify their choices as if Macs are the only objective solution that fits their use cases, but I find this hard to believe. I understand that everyone has its valid reasons behinds every choice they make, but what bothers me (I know it shouldn't but who cares) is when that people bash on Linux and other hardware manufacturers just because they don't LIKE that OS/computer. I don't LIKE macOS/Macs and I don't them, that doesn't mean they are not good systems. I just CHOOSE to not use them because MY reasons. Nowadays most systems offer more than acceptable user experiences out of the box, whether its a Linux/Windows/macOS box on whatever hardware. The thing is that people get really picky and justify their decisions by diminishing other manufacturers/systems. I believe people are afraid to say "I bought a Mac because I like them! f* you!"

jandrese 8y ago
For the most part I've been reasonably happy with Linux touchpads (maybe I'm too accepting of less than a perfect experience?) except for one area: Palm rejection. When you have a giant touchpad it's absolutely necessary to have good working palm rejection, and I've seen far too many laptops completely fail to have palm rejection in Ubuntu. Sometimes you can get it working again by twiddling the mouse driver (enable/disable xinput for example), but sometimes it just plain never works. I've been all over StackExchange and similar places but on some laptops none of the proposed solutions work. I've opened bug reports, but it's hard for developers to fix it when they can't replicate the problem. Sometimes you only get half functionality, like the cursor won't move but it will still click, moving your text cursor to random places when the palm lightly brushes the touchpad and it registers as a click. On some laptops I just have to pack in a mouse and disable the touchpad entirely. That's not an acceptable solution. I'm really hoping that Ubuntu 18 avoids some of this nonsense.
- MrLeftHand 8y ago
  For me Ubuntu 18 was worse then 16.10. A lot of properties I used to fine tune the touchpad with xinput were gone or changed. Was very disappointed. So if you haven't made the change yet, then you might want to stay on whatever you're on for the time being.
na85 8y ago
Where do you work that you have room to use a mouse? Coffee shops, planes, trains, passenger seat in a car, literally on my lap in waiting rooms or transit terminals, etc. This is where I use my laptop, and I don't have room for a mouse in these places.
- mkirklions 8y ago
  A desk
- innocenat 8y ago
  I put the mouse on my touchpad. Works well rnough

jandrese 8y ago

One baffling design decision Canonical made for 18 is defaulting some touchpads (ones without separate buttons) to "two finger click for right click", even though so many touchpads have a clicky area and even lines printed on the touchpad for right click. That's not the baffling part though, the baffling part is that they didn't put an option in the control panel to return the old behavior. You have to spin up dconf and find the right bit to twiddle to get the old behavior back. How is this user friendly? This is like 14 when they hid menu items by default (and replace them with absolutely nothing at all) causing newbies to be very confused as to how to use their apps. It only took a few times of very confused users being totally lost because they forgot they had to move their mouse up to the top to make the menu items reappear before I tracked down the dconf setting to turn it back on. It wasn't until 16 that they exposed that in the control panel, but even then it defaulted to "uselessly hide".

abrowne 8y ago
It's a GNOME change, not a Canonical one: http://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/04/gnome-328-uses-clickfinger-behaviour-by.html http://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/04/gnome-328-uses-clickfinger...
- jandrese 8y ago
  Canonical had the final word on it. They could have reverted the default to the old behavior if they wanted.