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You'd think "surely a touchpad is a touchpad", but the reality for most heavy users is that Apple really does have an experience substantially better than most
by sethhochberg 6y ago
You'd think "surely a touchpad is a touchpad", but the reality for most heavy users is that Apple really does have an experience substantially better than most in this area.
Large tracking surface. No dead zones, which can't be touched or tapped. Fantastic palm rejection. Gestures that work reliably, and never over or under-detect fingers.
Its not really to say that the Apple trackpads are better at their best than the other vendors, as much as it is that the other vendors often behave in unpredictable ways. I used to have a Thinkpad which worked every bit as well as my current Macbook trackpad when it worked right, but which would frequently fail to recognize a finger during a scrolling gesture, couldn't be clicked on the portion closest to the keyboard, and occasionally the palm rejection just wouldn't work. The minor annoyances over time add up to a much more frustrating experience.
- aarmenaa 6y agoI've noticed that two-finger scrolling, which should be one of the easiest things to get right, is wrong on basically anything that's not MacOS. Windows and Linux arbitrarily insist on 3-line scrolling in a lot of apps. Even when pixel scrolling is technically available, it works poorly. It appears small movements are ignored, and then once you've hit some sort of distance threshold the scroll "jumps" to register the whole movement. There's weird delays where you need to "un-touch" the pad before you can transition from moving the cursor to scrolling. The scroll gets "dropped" after a while even though I still have two fingers on the pad. I've seen all this across many laptops running Linux and Windows, including Macs, which leads me to believe that that the issue software.
- floatboth 6y ago> Windows and Linux arbitrarily insist on 3-line scrolling in a lot of apps Yes, macOS is definitely more consistent in terms of UI toolkits, of course. Stick to GTK apps (with libinput on your system of course) and everything should be great :)
- wbkang 6y agoActually on Windows, 3 line scrolling is a configurable default in the control panel. On X/Linux, on the other hand, is where it's hard-coded to 1 line and there is no way to change it to 3 without having undesired side effects (such as scroll events being fired 3 times).
- myself248 6y agoBut no matter what you set it to, an inch of scroll motion on the trackpad results in a different number of screen-inches of window movement, between different apps. In Ubuntu right now: Firefox seems pretty intuitive, one trackpad-height worth of finger movement results in roughly one screen-height worth of window movement. That's great. But LibreOffice Calc, for the same amount of finger movement in the upward direction, scrolls about 3 screenfulls up. And bizarrely, for the same amount of finger movement in the downward direction, scrolls about half a screen. Discord desktop app (which I assume is Electron like everything else), scrolls about 1.5 screens per touchpad-worth of finger movement. That's acceptably close to Firefox and not disorienting. Gedit scrolls about 2 screens per touchpad. Arduino IDE scrolls about 2 screens per touchpad. How on earth can these be different? And how do you even start to fix that?
- floriol 6y agoThey all use different UI toolkits, some are gtk, some are java UIs, some are electron-based apps. So that's why - it's a higher level problem that is unfortunately inherent to desktop fragmentation which is hard to avoid on linux.
- yencabulator 6y ago> Large tracking surface. No dead zones, which can't be touched or tapped. Looking forward to a driver that fixes those for you...