Touch on linux has always been a pet peeve of mine (I was the first to publish two-finger right click patches[1] for the synaptics driver http://wikigentoo.ksiezyc.pl/Synaptics_Touchpad.htm ). I've long thought about fixing the current drivers, but I can't prioritize the time myself. I'll donate some cash.
Luckily, this should be relatively simple. Anyone who wants to make this should be looking at the Chromium touchpad code (runs linux, and my Pixelbook touchpad is as good as a macbook touchpad. For example, the touch input filter: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/touch_... )
I think you'd get most of the quality with a kalman filter (A really cool filter that takes unstable input, and corrects it based on probabilities to give very high quality output).
On that note - does the synaptics driver not have all of the functionality the author wants - as long as he is willing to do the tweaking to the synclient settings?
(I have not used my touchpad since getting used to a trackpoint, but I vaguely remember using the synaptics driver to get it usable)
Edit: NVM, I read another one of his blog posts where he addresses synaptics and mtrack.
Thanks, I can't access the archive.is or the main site, so even tho I prefer to read the source I can't :-)
I think $50/hr might not be enough. I imagine there are very few devs who could do this correctly, doubling the wage and halving the time would cost the same but probably yield better results. I'm not the one paying tho.
I recently tried switching from an MBP to an X1 Carbon, in a yet another attempt to switch to Linux as my daily driver. I ended up being thwarted, to my surprise, by the touchpad support.
The big problem I encountered was poor palm detection: I learned through this process that I have a tendency to use the touchpad with my right hand, while my left hand is still in typing position. This means that the edge of my left palm rests along the upper-left corner of the touchpad. This would result in the driver sometimes detecting two touchpoints instead of one, and I would end up scrolling when I meant to move the pointer.
The result of this was pretty amazing to me: after a few hours of use I found that my wrists, shoulders, and neck hurt because I was subconsciously trying to adjust my hands to avoid this. After a couple of days trying different drivers and tweaking config files, I ended up conceding that it just wasn't there yet.
It's too bad: I have lots of imposter syndrome about understanding my OS and using Linux seems like a great cure. But after literally decades of trying, what I've noticed is that hardware (or at least, my acclimating to new hardware) always advances enough past Linux's capabilities that the switch is difficult. In the past, it was about getting sound cards or WiFi working, and nowadays it's about things like touchpads and high-resolution displays.
I find that, with my Thinkpads that I don't use the touchpad at all. I find the trackpoint a much more convenient pointing device as it keeps my hands a home row.
On Thinkpads, there's also the thumb buttons below the space bar that act as mouse buttons. The middle one allows you to scroll with the trackpoint. It's very convenient.
Trackpoints are amazing! I just wish they were more popular. I have had to resort to building custom keyboards with trackpoints to overcome the limited availability.
But when you push it in one direction too long, then let it go neutral, it'll have a bias into the other direction and move there by itself for a few seconds.
This is so surprising to me. I use Fedora on Thinkpad T580 (Fedora keeps the kernel very fresh (and has best/latest hardware fixes in it)) but I can't get the palm detection to fail for me even if I try. It just works with the out-of-the-box settings for me.
This is actually usually pretty configurable. You have to use the actual config file though and not the GUI to get the really tunable numeric settings of palm-size and whatnot.
Also, understand that there's libinput or touchpad synaptics and you can use the other one if one isn't working for you. I have had better luck with libinput myself but it probably depends on the hardware.
That is such a horrible user experience though, it's no different than having to hack apart your X11 config file to get the proper modeline support for your monitor, or to map your keyboard so your Super key works.
Thankfully we've moved past those problems for now, until you want to use multiple screens or use a touchpad.
Desktop Linux still has a long way to go if there is ever going to be any appreciable market share.
You can help improve the situation: The libinput project mentioned in the article is attempting to cut back on the amount of configuration and provide sane defaults for things like this, but there are a huge amount of touchpads out there to test. The idea is that once something is added to their database of "quirks", then it can be contributed upstream, and the device will be configured correctly for everyone. More info here: https://who-t.blogspot.com/2018/06/libinput-and-its-device-q...
If you figure out the right settings while using the legacy synaptics driver, please consider translating them a libinput quirks file and sending them back to the right place. I promise you are not the only one who doesn't want to fiddle around with legacy drivers anymore.
Every time I try to use Linux, I come to the conclusion that the user experience makes it not worth the effort it would take to be a daily driver. I always feel like I just don't have the knowledge to get things done in a reasonably efficient manner... And the OS needs more polish.
There's always some annoying little problems that take a mountain of effort to properly diagnose and solve. Things like dual monitor support not working properly when the monitors have different resolutions, or YouTube dropping out of fullscreen when you focus on a different window.
To be fair, these kinds of issues are probably no problem for someone with lots of experience... But I'm not one of those.
I also find that the gap between windows and Linux has narrowed dramatically over the last 10 years. Whenever I try a fresh install (every couple years), I'm surprised at how much better it feels.
Linux is great on the server. It will never be good on the human interface because hardware and UX trends evolve and fragment faster the tiny user community can afford to support.
Hmm, I don't recall ever having a problem with palms on any touchpad, ever. On desktop I do usually use Windows or MacOS (mostly terminal on Linux), but I do occasionally use Linux (Ubuntu) on an aging HP Zbook, and never had an issue. I used to use Ubuntu desktop a lot quite a few years back, and don't recall any issues even then.
I've switched to a MBP 2015 as my work laptop about 1 year ago, and it's the only device I have palm issues with. I've never, ever had any issues with other laptops (my previous work laptop was a T460). I guess the bigger-than-usual touchpad size on the MBP is the main issue.
Could someone ELI5, why it is so difficult to make it right? And I do not mean exclusively to Linux, because Windows has been horrible for years now too.
If the issue is hardware, then we'd blame OEMs.
If it's software, then we'd blame, say, Microsoft.
If it was a combination of these two, then we could say that Apple is the only one that controls both... if it wasn't for the Surface series which still has atrocious touchpad experience.
Honestly, I think a lot of people forget the real reason:
In one corner, Apple got there by mainlining trackpad and trackpad software development...with iPhone touchscreen R&D.
You have basically the largest R&D product in the world dictating the software that controls their trackpads. We are talking advanced finger speed and direction prediction (not just detection), AI to ignore unintended touches, and hardware and software that have been built specifically for them. It's no secret that all of Apple's laptops effectively have the same trackpad in various sizes and that the tech in the touchpad is nearly identical to to that in an iPhone minus a display. (Including the taptic engine and `3D Touch` aka, `Force Touch`.)
In the other corner, you have people with laptops by random companies with random hardware and drivers written by FOSS contributors/ Laptop ODMs/ Legacy Microsoft Drivers.
FOSS is fantastic, but it can't generally compete with a Billion dollar a year R&D budget stretched over 10 years feeding back improvements.
They always had better scrolling due to custom drivers but it wasn't anything like today until 2008, when the macbook air came out with the (now iconic), Glass capacitive Trackpad. The presentation repeatedly referenced the iphone and how they were learning from the iPhone and using it's tech.
If you used a pre-2008 trackpad and then the modern Apple trackpad you would see massive differences.
I don't remember the difference between the non-unibody and unibody trackpads being that dramatic. They were better, sure, but it was a difference of degree, whereas PC trackpads, especially of the time, were borderline unusable after you'd used a pre-unibody Mac one.
It was very dramatic. For one, it stopped being a physical, clickable trackpad and became a single piece of glass with haptic button pushes. Losing the physical components also gave more room to make it larger and it's gotten bigger since. You also got more multi-touch options. It was pretty big.
>It was very dramatic. For one, it stopped being a physical, clickable trackpad and became a single piece of glass with haptic button pushes. Losing the physical components also gave more room to make it larger and it's gotten bigger since. You also got more multi-touch options. It was pretty big.
All of these are correct but have nothing / little to do with the quality of the main trackpad use experience, which was still great on Macs before it got haptic pushes, larger size, glass, etc.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. The experience was great on Macs before then but it was still a dramatic difference when this change happened because we got additional gestures, much more precise tracking, and a larger surface area with less friction than the previous models.
The root of the iPhone's multitouch technology was in a company called Fingerworks, which was founded in the late 1990s by some academics, and acquired in 2004 by Apple. Fingerworks touch keyboards and trackpads worked extremely well and supported complex gestures using up to 5 fingers.
The 2005 Powerbook was the first to support multi-finger input on the trackpad... probably not a coincidence. We now know that the tablet/phone project kicked into high gear around this time as well.
I think this is really where Apple took a big step in their trackpads across the board. I had an iBook from before this time and while the trackpad was nice, I did not think it was way better than my PC laptop's trackpad. The biggest difference was that the Mac trackpad was about 30% larger.
Apple also invested in touch concept company-wide, including gestures in their marketing and shipping a trackpad as a first-class option for desktops in 2010. I think part of the reason Apple has done well with touch is that they just prioritized it and tried harder at it.
Yeah, I remember noticing on first using an iBook (2003 or so) how ridiculously better the trackpad was than anything I'd used before, and that wasn't new hardware or software then.
As the above commenter mentioned: a combination of hardware & software gives Apple and inherent advantage, which—along with Apple just having a culture of prioritising UX in their products (and MS kind of being in decline at the time, before their recent resurgence)—would explain the pre-iPhone trackpads being ahead of their competitors.
With Surface, while MS do control both elements, they're playing catchup on years and years of progress by Apple.
Combine all that with the recent mainlining of iPhone R&D and catching them seems really really tough.
Some other vendors. I'll take the trackpad on my Dell M3800, or a Logitech T651 when using a Mac, over a Mac trackpad any day of the week. Subjectively, of course!
The touchpad on all the HP Zbooks and crappy Dell laptops I've had over the years have all been better than, or at least as good as, Macbook touchpad, for me.
Hell, I even have a low power, super cheap Lenovo laptop (Atom CPU, IIRC), and I much prefer the touchpad on that over my MBP's!
Honestly, it feels like some Apple users almost fetishise over their MB touchpads! I truly don't get it.
I don't get it, what's so much better about them? I prefer a separate keyboard and mouse, but the trackpad on my Zbook for example, and previously Elitebooks, felt and worked just fine.
Scrolling, zoom, clicking, what else do I need? :/
1- Apple puts much bigger trackpads on their machines. I've got a 2015 MBP that had a huge trackpad on it when it came out, now it looks tiny compared to the new ones. The Surface Pro's trackpad looks like it's about 2/3 the size of my MBP, and half the size of the latest MBPs.
2- The trackpads are flush with the body of the machine. I've often used PC trackpads where you were expected to scroll using the right side of the trackpad, but it was basically unusable because the plastic bezel was in the way.
3- The finger tracking is phenomenal. I don't know, it "just works", whereas PC trackpads would often lose track of my finger, forcing me to repeat the movement while pressing harder.
4- The multi-touch is great. 2-finger scrolling feels way more natural than using the side of the trackpad. No wonder it's been (often poorly) copied by basically everyone else.
I don't doubt that some PCs have very good trackpads, but Apple's has been consistently a pleasure to use on every Mac I've used, to the point that I don't bother carrying my mouse when I travel with my laptop.
Mac trackpads also have a much larger area that can be used for clicking. In my experience, Windows trackpads are unusable for clicking (the area doesn’t depress) in the back most (i.e. closest to the screen) 1/4 to 1/3 of the trackpad.
And this includes Microsoft hardware such as Surface Books. (To be clear, it’s a hardware issue, but one would think Microsoft would shell out for better trackpads on their flagship devices.)
On my MBP, it really feels like I have to press with far too much force to get it to "click" (which isn't great given I suffer from nerve damage, but I felt the same about the trackpad even before that). By comparison, I just make a "purposeful", light tap on any other trackpad.
If you have a newer (2015+) MBP with Force Touch, that's actually configurable! Go in System Preferences -> Touchpad -> Point and click, you can choose between "Light", "Medium" and "Firm" clicks. You can also enable just touching to click.
Also, you can just use the bottom part of the trackpad exactly like you'd use a button, it ignores touches if you just rest your thumb on it. Works really well.
I should have mentioned, but it's already on the light setting, and it still feels like I need to press it too hard. I recall asking my wife to try it (she'd never used a MB before), and she also found it unpleasant.
I'm not saying whether or not Apple trackpads are better or worse than PC trackpads, but I don't think I've seen a laptop that doesn't support multi touch scrolling (horizontal and vertical, of course) in at least 5 years. Maybe in the low budget range? The side scrolling thing is there for the people who are used to it, but two finger drag has been standardised in any laptop I've seen.
My laptop has a Synaptics trackpad and while it doesn't have stuff like force touch, it's just as comfortable as using a mouse in many occasions.
You're absolutely right. We're still young, though, so yeah, don't completely discourage FOSS etc I have high hopes. And I would be glad for Mac's Apple's successes, I just am sure that FOSS etc will catch "up" too. We are still young. Let's prais both apple and foss, it's not a question about winning, it's just existing. It's so easy to not choose apple or mac, and, so easy for those who want to go into the apple orchards. And that is great.
If I was being uncharitable I'd say that the problem is that companies beside Apple just don't care about a good user experience. Maybe they could produce the same product if they thought it mattered. With almost all non-Apple laptops being flimsy, cheap-feeling plastic junk, stuffed full of ports and bezels, I feel like they're miles away from being at the stage where it makes sense to optimise the trackpad.
Companies optimize towards whatever drives their customers buying decisions.
For some makers that’s going to be performance or cost. For businesses laptops reliability and security are going to be big factors.
For Apple the overall experience is a large part of why people buy; Apple users want a great hardware experience integrated into the OS, and they’re willing to sacrifice performance and price to get it.
You’re giving Dell / HP / etc too much credit. They’ve tried over and over again to build a machine with Macbook level quality. They have laptops that cost just as much, if not more, than a Macbook. And every one of them has some glaring issue.
It’s not some purposeful design decision. They just don’t have the same caliber of engineers or management that Apple has.
This is it. Apple is willing to spend money on actual R&D for user experience. Dell and hp and friends essentially just assemble off the shelf parts into a styled chassis. It took dell years to bother developing a thin camera module instead of having a nose cam. It does come at a cost and until recently windows machines were not able to recoup it (probably chicken and egg scenario)
Until Microsoft forced precision touch pads windows touch pads were awful since the oems just slapped in garbage vendor drivers.
Screen aspect ratio is another thing. Everyone but apple moved to 16:9 since it's cheaper but 16:10 is better for productivity and not bad for media. But even the business windows laptops pinch pennies and do 16:9. Only apple was willing to buy 16:10 panels.
I honestly think a lot of it is just (bad) prioritization. An analogous situation; remember when Mac laptops had far, far better battery life than PC laptops? Like ridiculously better. People usually thought it was some magic property of the PowerPC; then Intel Mac laptops came out and they were still ridiculously better. Then Intel started taking it seriously, and a few Centrino revisions later the gap had narrowed dramatically.
I remember reading at the time that, when idle, the chipset in many PC laptops used more power than the CPU...
All Apple stuff's that way, it seems. A lot of it's the software. Just compare the effect of Safari versus Firefox or Chrome on MacBook battery life. One of these projects clearly gives a quite a large damn about power use—the other two... not so much.
I worked on software for phones and tablets right around the 2/3 split for Android, up through Android 5 or so. We had lots of testing devices of all quality levels. The joke-but-actually-100%-true around the office was that an Android tablet left unplugged on a desk over the weekend was always dead when you got back on Monday, while an iPad forgotten in a drawer for a month would have a useful amount of charge left on it (and come to life instantly, of course, as if it had never been asleep). Didn't seem to matter how much the Android device cost.
Totally. I own Android phones and tablets. But when I pick up a friend's iPhone or iPad, it's clear that the user experience is more polished. Is that because Google has a lower caliber engineers than Apple? I doubt it. Certainly the people I know at both companies are equally smart.
it's simply what is P1 and thus gets engineering bandwidth to fix. looks like UX is P1 at apple and just isn't at other companies ('isn't perfect but works', 'takes one click more than it could', etc.)
I'd be surprised if that was the case; they should be in a similar hiring position to Apple. They just seem... less interested in it.
And it's not just designers; it's everything around user experience. For instance, both Terminal.app and the Apple bluetooth keyboard (when plugged into USB) have class-leading latency. That wasn't designers, but it probably also wasn't accidental.
Mind you, the Apple today arguably isn't as good at this stuff as the Apple of a decade or so, and they really fall down in some areas (Apple Music grumble mutter).
Fair, from the outside it’s hard to tell the difference between low quality, poor management, or under staffing. What I can say is that Google’s design is somewhere between bad and inconsistent.
You're right, it's not a design decision. That degree of optimization is not something that happens at the product design level -- it is organization-wide optimization.
When Apple leverages iPhone R&D for their MacBook, they get it for free. If it takes Dell 50 million dollars to develop the tech, and Dell expects to sell 100,000 laptops, then if we assume everything else is equal, an equivalent Dell laptop would carry a premium of $500 over a MacBook. In which case, they probably wouldn't sell 100,000 laptops, and it would be a failure and a waste of 50 million bucks.
I would bet cash money that Dell, etc, could do just as poorly with equally good engineers. With differences that persist this long and are this far-reaching, I think you have to look at culture, process, and values.
For all Jobs' flaws, he built an amazing culture around valuing user experience and putting that first. That's extremely hard to do, especially with a dominant business culture that instead values things like individual performance metrics, quarterly profit numbers, and low labor costs. The average piece of consumer electronics gets 3-7 physical prototypes before launch; the iPod had over 100. That's not down to the caliber of engineers or line managers.
I think “culture” and “management” kind of bleed into each other, because at the end of the day you’re going to do whatever the manager tells you to do. If they tell you to make 100 more prototypes until you perfect the iPod, you’ll do it. If they tell you what we have isn’t perfect but it’s good enough, then you’ll go with that.
I think doing only what managers say is a fine example of bad culture. People who have been trained to not care can make a hundred prototypes and still not make anything great. People who believe that the organization will support them in making something great for the users will push to do more prototypes until they get it really right.
My new-this-spring HP EliteBook (ordered custom with FreeDOS) running Ubuntu 20.04 seems flawless to me, although YMMV. This coming from someone who has only ever owned Macs and uses Macs at work.
I agree there's nothing original about the basic design, but that's true of a lot of mature products. With USB ports on both sides (in additional to Thunderbolt 3) and an HDMI port, it's a lot like the 2015 MacBook Pro aka the "best laptop ever made"¹. But mine has a great matte touchscreen, so there are some new ideas.
The older I get the more I realize raw performance matters far less than the experience of using the machine every day. Macos is comfortable, so that's what I go with. Heavy lifting is better done with something permanently plugged into a wall.
These are not glaring issues to most mac buyers, with the possible exception of the touchbar.
Most Mac buyers both want OSX, and use iPhones. If you want Linux, don't buy a Macbook Pro, you'll save a ton of money on features you don't need, and get better hardware support.
I love the Touch Bar and the fact that the new Macbooks have a physical escape key should pretty much silence any devs that were screaming about losing one.
All laptop keyboards are awful, and they encourage horrible posture. If you’re going to do extended typing in a fixed position, get an external keyboard monitor. The laptop keyboard should be for short term, mobile use only.
They instead get an adaptable keybed, that can be used as sliders, piano keys, timeline managers, and other controls, plus a fast and secure fingerprint sensor (PC ones are laughable), and a physical escape key again.
>not being able to run Linux natively
On exchange they get stronger security from the T2 controller handgling they keyboard, etc. Besides, most dodn't buy Macbooks to run Linux on them (though Linus used to love them for that purpose).
That said, if they're willing to turn it off, there's ongoing work from the Linux side to let it boot, talk to the SSD, keyboard, etc.
>not integrating with any phones except the ones it makes
I'm pretty sure it integrates just fine with my Android phone. Do you know something I don't know?
I downvoted you before you added your second and third bullet points, because you were taking a cheap shot. Even with the additional points, you're comparing apples to oranges.
Apple chose to remove physical function keys. No other manufacturer has previously had a smooth trackpad and chosen to remove it.
I genuinely don’t get what the big deal about function keys are. I never used them heavily, even on external keyboards. I actually transitioned to external keyboards that don’t have them, to save space.
The only key that’s useful on that top row is escape, IMHO. They should make that a key. Everything else is low utility.
Maybe your particular development environment(s) don't use function keys, but I find function keys indispensable when debugging. Most debuggers I use have the function keys mapped for step-over, step-out, and step-into.
The editors and IDEs I use also generally use the function keys for code-search, goto-defintion, and symbol-rename.
For me (and I suspect many others), the lack of tactile function keys is a productivity hit.
My two development environments have been Emacs and IntelliJ. The latter does depend on function keys for the actions you’re describing, but I’ve found it utterly impossible to memorize them. There’s no mnemonic available for F keys; so remember which is step over and which is step in just does not stick. I ended up rebinding those long before the touchbar arrived.
When I buy (or build) a kb, I have the expectation to be able to tell it how to operate; that's why I needed it, after all. I find it tedious to remap lots of keybindings (was super+... global? shit.) when I can simply assign 24-48 non-conflicting commands to function keys.
Some map to scripts, others to specific actions in the tools I use, some are used to turn on cameras, switch users, chance resolutions, pull all logs, push commands to restart devices in VMs or bring up or take down containers, start or stop services, reset PCI or storage devices, or semi-automate git. It's really whatever I want to press a button and make happen. It was much worse when I first got clever with udev and dbus years and years ago.
I've always hated clicking and menu-hunting. If I know what I want to do, I don't want to wade through someone else's idea of UX to get to it.
I mean, you can add your own things to the Touch Bar for such tasks, but you’re already pushing the limits of any laptop keyboard. At that point you’re better off using something with programmable firmware, not the built in.
Yes, and it's a glaring issue with management that they "chose" to do that. New shiny thing that compromises on fundamentals like touch typing support.
Have you seen any Windows laptops in the past five years? Many Windows ultrabooks rival Apple's in terms of "ports and bezels." The XPS 13, for example, has significantly thinner bezels than the MacBook Pro I'm typing this on, at a much more reasonable price.
Look at the external power supplies and the packaging thereof in the box to see the difference in ethos and approach.
Even these “nice” PC laptops still come with a PSU that has ugly plastic-coated white wraparound paper stickers and labels on the black cords with meaningless unimportant shit on them (leaving oily adhesive residue on the cord even if you cut it off), bricks in the middle of the cable (AC and DC lines out opposing ends), plastic twist ties, in plastic baggies covered in meaningless production stickers. Apple doesn’t even do that on the cheap AppleTV.
This is to say nothing of the ugly metallic stickers they slap on the wristrests to spam you for the life of the machine.
The janky plastic trackpads are one of many issues with the approach that most of the industry takes. There are very few machines that even remotely aspire the level of care Apple puts into their each and every product.
Apple also just overhauled the speaker system in the 16” rMBP, making it easily 50% better than any laptop I’ve ever heard. It’s startlingly good, sound I never thought I’d hear out of a laptop.
I’m at a place in life where I have broken my iMessage dependency and find KDE to be delightful; I would absolutely love to pay a premium for an equivalent quality PC laptop, but there aren’t any in the ballpark, even. There are ones that are merely “good” (Razer Blade), none “great” (though the Pixelbook Eve comes close!), and zero have ever been insanely so, AFAIK.
> bricks in the middle of the cable (AC and DC lines out opposing ends)
Huh? That's a feature. Apple's are awful without the AC extension cord. They're way too short (with the packaged USBC cable) and they eat a couple outlets on a power strip, rather than one. Bricks that don't have both, or at least the option for both (as Apple's do, though last I saw the AC cord is an add-on these days while it used to be included, which is bullshit on a laptop that expensive) are inferior, unless they're very small and for a device rarely used very far from an outlet while plugged-in (the newer, small-style iPhone charger bricks are OK)
EDIT: in general though I agree that even "high end" PC laptops are so terrible that Apple can repeatedly fuck up and dawdle on upgrades and raise prices for years on end and still not really have any competition.
Why do you need such a comically long power cable? I appreciate the compact nature of the Apple brick. I don't understand why you think they take up more than one outlet. It doesn't for me.
I mean it's just an absolute joke how ugly they are.
Why are they covered in so much writing that doesn't matter to me? Just have a discrete model number that I can look thing up from. Why are there so many icons? It's noise. Why do they have those massive ferrite cores on the cables? Twice even! Apple seem to manage without them. Why do they have those boots on the end of each cable? Apple manage without them.
Why are they so ugly?? Does nobody at Dell ever say 'hang on why are Apple able to do without all this _stuff_?'
> Why do you need such a comically long power cable?
The USB-C cable in the box is, what, one meter? That won't even reach through a cable-hole in a desk down to the floor. Maybe they've fixed it but I distinctly remember receiving a brand new MBP shortly after the all-USB-C shift that had a uselessly short included cable and no AC cord included.
> I appreciate the compact nature of the Apple brick. I don't understand why you think they take up more than one outlet.
If your power strip's ports are arranged sideways I guess it might be OK, though then they're prone to "tipping" out of the port if bumped. Otherwise they're definitely the length of two ports on a power strip, at least with US-style plugs. I don't understand how you could look at it and not think it takes up two since it just is for sure longer than one port, unless plugged into the one on the very end. And I'm looking at one for a 2014 Magsafe model right now—the ones on newer MacBooks are even larger (I have those, too)
[EDIT] even my iPad Pro charger is longer than one outlet and blocks the second, and it's smaller than any MacBook Pro or even Air brick I've seen.
The big 96W ones come unplugged pretty easily from their weight alone. If you have an old house it won't even plug into the wall without falling out immediately. Less of an issue with the 61W, or if you get a GaN charger from another manufacturer.
The XPS 13 power supply is a pretty comprehensive Apple-esque ripoff (but in black), and doesn't have any of the stuff, so we know Dell is capable of it.
They did shit-up their included usb-c to usb-a adapter though with a pointless ugly hang tag. (To be fair, Apple doesn't give you one at all, but I'd rather buy a non-ugly one out of pocket than use the Dell included one for free.)
> They did shit-up their included usb-c to usb-a adapter though with a pointless ugly hang tag.
Cut it off? I also read a comment in this thread complaining about the laptop coming with stickers on them. You realize you can remove this stuff, right? Or are we really that lazy?
I have a lot of hardware, so I have spent a lot of time doing precisely that.
Cutting off twist ties, removing those pointless little white HDPE condoms they put on the blades of the AC plug, plastic bags, more plastic bags, the sticky superthin protection plastic film that almost every china manufacturing plant puts on any shiny plastic flat surface, peeling keyboard stickers, carefully applying goo gone to remove the glue, then glass cleaner to remove the goo gone, cutting the stupid labels off of AC cords (being careful not to damage the cord in the process), et c.
You also have to be careful not to scratch the case with the metallic wrist rest stickers when removing them, as well, because the corners are sharp and the glue is serious so you have to pry them up with a tool. The large, ugly stickers on the bottom have important things like serial on them, so you can't remove those if you ever want your warranty to work (Apple, of course, laser etches the serial into the aluminum case in small type).
Why was any of that useless shit shipped to me in the first place, on a high end computer?
It's not about the hang tag, it's about a fundamental lack of empathy for the customer and their experience. That's the root cause, and it manifests itself as everything from building relatively decent computers and then shipping them with ugly accessories, to using plastic trackpads, to not pushing back against Intel's ugly marketing case sticker demands, et c et c et c ad nauseam.
It's like buying an $80k car and on delivery suddenly finding out it doesn't have keyless entry, or that the brand new key fob is shipped in one of those hand-slicingly-difficult wraparound plastic blister containers.
Come to think of it, the key fobs on high end cars shouldn't be made out of cheap plastic, either. A replacement one for my car cost me over $400 which I'm sure is all margin. Step up, hardware makers.
The stickers on PC laptops tend to require cleaning with solvents to remove all the goo. It's absurd one has to spend time removing ads and wrist-scratchers (some of the stickers are quite tall, as well) from the case of the computer one just paid for.
That cable may be ugly, but I know that the insulation isn't going to disintegrate within a year, which is a known problem with Apple's PVC-free devices.
Why are people at Dell tolerating it being ugly? What is wrong with the company culture that nobody says - hang on that looks like garbage shall we fix it?
From Dell I can buy a 30w charger for £11.63, or a 90w charger for £19.55.
From Apple I get just a mains lead for £19.95. Apple have 30w USB C charger (with mains plug) for £49, and all their other Mac chargers are £79.
The Apple chargers are nice, but I don't get the hostility to the Dell chargers. Why are people looking at the charger?
If we're talking about chargers, what's wrong with the company culture at Apple that nobody says - "hang on, why are we gently electrocuting our users? shall we fix it?"
In time, my friend. Every apple cable I've had has failed after a few years. Usually the sheath by the end will get squeezed off of the insulation and expose the wiring. Over time this gets damaged and eventually the cord stops working. Typically I would fix this with a layer of gaffer tape if I notice the cord starting to slip out of it's shielding.
There's also something about the wiring material that makes it prone to breaking the insulation at the mid point. Small pinches turn into a crack that becomes a gaping hole, and can also be a point of failure. Most of my old magsafe cables that have seen years of service look like zebras with all the black gaffer tape patches I've had to put on them, but they work at least.
Here are some images of this, it seemed to have become a serious issue when apple switched to that grippy rubber coating on their cabling:
Inspect your apple cables once a month for any signs of damage or pulling at the ends. Until Apple changes the material for their wiring insulation and beefs up strain relief at both ends, it's not a matter of if your cable will fail, but when. You can prolong this with patches of gaffer tape, but it will look like hell.
I kinda love the apple charger situation. They never changed the long cord, so I have like half a dozen accumulated over the years tucked around my house, be it by the desk in a power strip or behind the couch in some hard to reach outlet. If I want to plug in, I just slap on the brick to the nearest convenient long cord, and there are plenty. If I am out and about, I'll throw the nub on the brick and tuck the whole thing in my sleeve. Then again with modern battery life, rarely do I need the charger when I'm out and about (nor is there much of that going on right now with the pandemic).
My biggest gripe, other than the lack of magsafe, is that they removed the cord wrapping arms from the brick. It really kept things tidy in the bag.
> This is to say nothing of the ugly metallic stickers they slap on the wristrests to spam you for the life of the machine.
What is up with these? I bought a Win laptop recently to test it out, and one of the first things that struck me at the store was that all of them had literal ads on the inside front of the lap top.
This might have just been Marketing team fucking it for everyone else, but my gut feeling was that any company that stoops that low is certainly not above severely cut corners.
I think Intel makes them do it, and it has become such a tradition/standard that everyone just expects their computer to have ugly-ass nearly-impossible-to-remove stickers there now. High end, low end, whatever. They all do it, and I think PC users have just tuned it out, like non-cordcutters with the 17 minutes per hour of commercials.
It’s utterly gross.
TBH, the lack of it was so surprising on the Pixelbook (Eve) that it caused me to take a longer/deeper look at the hardware, and it's actually top-notch. I own about 5 of them.
ChromeOS runs a full linux in a VM, so I use that for stuff like signal-desktop. It also ships with docker. 99% of my daily tasks are chrome + zsh,docker,ssh,vim,go,python,git,syncthing.
I also just got the special closed case debugging orange cable that will let me reflash the bootloader (even the normally r/o parts) to turn them optionally into normal computers. I rather dig the security “guarantees” provided by ChromeOS but I also simply adore the design and build quality and screen and keyboard of the Eve, so I will probably do that to my 16GB/nvme one and put Gentoo hardened on it (all the others are 8GB/sata).
No, not the large curved shiny ones that show the specs that you are expected to remove immediately after purchase.
The small square ones made out of little metal plates that are glued on there like there’s no tomorrow, the ones you are never intended to remove, like the intel one you’ve now seen so many times it’s invisible.
They’re anything but easy to remove: you have to pry them up with a tool like a spudger, being careful not to scratch the case with either the tool or the opposite edge of the metal plate, and then use a solvent to get the 0.5mm thick glue pad off the case, then use a cleaner to get the solvent off. Years back before I resolved to stop buying cheap plastic computers, some of the solvents I used to remove the glue actually permanently damaged the surface finish of the wrist rest.
Now I just don’t buy computers with ugly spam on them. I was impressed and amazed that my iPhone 11 actually has no writing whatsoever anywhere on the case, which is a regulatory feat I didn’t think was even possible (they put the required regulatory markings behind the info button on the pre-activation screen), and I think a first for the whole mobile phone industry.
> The small square ones made out of little metal plates that are glued on there like there’s no tomorrow, the ones you are never intended to remove, like the intel one you’ve now seen so many times it’s invisible.
I've never had a problem removing those smaller rectangle stickers, and it's something I do to any computer I buy. For second hand computers there is a problem that you'll be left with a small discoloured patch.
> some of the solvents I used to remove the glue
A tiny drop of oil is usually good to get the glue off.
> Now I just don’t buy computers with ugly spam on them.
I definitely agree! I really do wish they'd stop using those stickers.
ThinkPad speakers are terrible to the point of being basically unusable even in a quiet room for most video calls.
I can live without the trackpad (once you learn to love the trackpoint you'll never go back to a trackpad) but the speakers and display are the two lacking points. Even though it's a 1440p display, it just doesn't look as nice as a "retina" display and getting a 4k display on a 13" laptop is in my mind an absurd waste of battery and money.
That's not really accurate; a similarly specced XPS 13 is several hundred dollars cheaper than my laptop. But Apple is certainly winning the touchpad game, you're right about that.
You've proved his point. Similar spec with some components, but the Apple machine costs a few hundred more because other components are better than the XPS.
Yeah, but almost nobody opts for the super high resolution display because the screen is so small that the difference is basically unnoticeable. A similar configuration to my laptop is several hundred dollars cheaper, and that's a not insignificant difference.
The high res screen is the reason I switched to macbooks after a lifetime of windows laptops in the first place. I still have and use my 2012 macbook pro retina which is about 6 more years of functional life than I've gotten out of any windows laptop, and it cost the same then as the base XPS 13 does now.
The prices between manufacturers aren't really all that different; but, if they happen to be important for you, Apple has a few features and components that others haven't been able to replicate at any price point, which is why paying the Apple tax is worth it to some.
I'm not going to engage in some arcane debate about the particularities of random windows laptops vs. apple ones. The fact is that there are comparable windows laptops at this point when it comes to "bezels and ports," in particular, but also when it comes to most things that make a laptop nice to use.
I was just responding to your claim that the difference between the standard res screen and the 4k screen is unnoticeable. There’s a very easily noticeable difference between them, and the retina display on the MacBook Pro is much closer in quality to the 4k display. So it doesn’t make sense to compare the price of an XPS with a standard res screen to the price of a MacBook Pro with a retina screen.
This is actually a paradigm example of Apple getting it right. Other manufacturers offer you a choice between a crappy low DPI display or an ultra high DPI display that drains your battery. Apple offer you a sensible compromise.
I'm so getting downvoted for this, but let me just say it: the iPhone IPS not-even-FullHD displays are sad. The exact same inferiority you mention, in reverse -_-
Why do you think "not-even-FullHD" is an issue if it passes the benchmark of not being able to see individual pixels? Higher resolutions than that aren't just pointless, they're counterproductive.
I guess some people see better... I like 17 inch displays, and while 4K looks great, FullHD is better for actually working. Maybe my eyes are going bad...
> the screen is so small that the difference is basically unnoticeable
At the same scaling, maybe. But I use the high resolution display on my work-provided MacBook at 125%, which means a massive virtual screen estate gain.
Presumably the vast majority of people are not going to want to scale their 13-inch display so that everything is significantly harder to read for the sake of increased screen real estate. But I'm glad that the MacBook works well for your specific use case.
I currently work on a MacBook Pro 13 and I switched from a XPS 13 with a 4k display. They're largely comparable, and the only difference I notice or care about is the OS. It seems that is how it is for most people.
When I use other screens (including the iPhone SE I'm typing this on) the reason I struggle isn't lack of real estate, it's everything looking so massive and oddly hard to read because it's too big.
It's not just the pixel density, it's not allowing me to scale everything way down. The smallest font in settings is too big. UI elements are too big. With the keyboard open writing this there's about an inch high of the actual page visible, barely more than this textarea itself.
(It's the old SE, FWIW. Bought a refurb to try iOS when my Android phone broke. But the repair for that was arranged right around when lockdown started so I've been using this for longer than anticipated. Not the polished 'just works' experience I expected, the a priori known restrictions on changing default apps, browsers, etc. aside.)
From what I noticed Apple seems to relatively okay at this. On Android the typical app redesign has the key feature "we made the previews larger", which is always an infinitely stupid idea, because the main view of most apps is a list, meaning you want some overview over what's available. Soundcloud and Spotify (there are many more I can't think of right now) seem to think that a gigantic either very obstructed or totally generic cover is better than being able to see multiple titles at once (what the fuck - doubly so since Soundcloud removed the most awesome feature of showing a wave form preview - newer versions coincidentally only show you a portion of the wave form in full screen in playback mode).
Setting a custom DPI only helps a little - side elements like nav bars do get smaller, but all the layout is still completely the same, like everything is designed for a tiny phone (which absurdly nobody makes anymore).
What are designers thinking? Is it really just short-sighted "look, we like content" and "but pretty", or is it something that actually improves UX for most people and just leaves me bewildered?
How long were VGA ports commonplace in laptops? Few, if any, laptop OEMs were interested in trying to refine the mobile experience until just a few years ago.
Not that I’m a fan of those (haven’t owned a non Apple laptop in over a decade) but the reason they had those is that a VGA is the only way you’re gonna be sure that the projector in whatever random Fortune 500 meeting room you’re in can connect to your laptop. They’re kind of compensating for corporate IT being absolute garbage.
The point was - there's no option available. Nobody but Apple seems to be capable of doing it. That's what this thread is about. If you can't think of any counter examples then that's an argument in my favour not yours!
Obviously they do care, as you can see by their investment in numerous attempts at in-house proprietary designs. They of course fucked up a few times, but you can’t say they haven’t tried. Otherwise they’d just be using some off the shelf keyboard assembly from a 3rd party supplier.
I love the typing experience of the butterfly keyboard. The reliability issues obviously suck, but Apple cares enough about those to have switched to a new design. That being said, I have a MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with 4th gen butterfly keyboards and haven't personally experienced any reliability problems with them. I suspect that the 4th gen pretty much fixed the reliability issues, but Apple recognized that the PR battle had long been lost.
I find typing on the butterfly keyboard strange but pleasant. It made me change the way I handle the keyboard though due to the nearly nonexistent travel in the switches.
Well people make mistakes. I guess they got it wrong if so many people don't like it. But they were trying to improve it, even if it failed. Other companies aren't trying to improve anything.
What nonsense is this? It is very clear that Dell has tried to improve the XPS 13 over the years and it has gotten better. They figured out a way to have the webcam on top and super thin bezels, something Apple hasn't been able to do.
If Apple didn't care they'd use some junk off-the-shelf keyboard, like PC laptop manafacturers use. They're trying to build something better themselves. A lot of people think they got it wrong this time, ok, but they're trying. Nobody else is!
I have a £200 Linx14 laptop and the keyboard is identical to my Apple keyboard (the wireless white keyboard, external). Sure, the Mac one bounces a bit more but there's no difference.
This makes no sense whatsoever, firstly you have to ignore the thing less than a centimetre away from the trackpad - the keyboard that Apple completely fucked up for half a decade. Does Apple just not care about a good user experience?
Secondly, non-Apple laptops aren't cheap-feeling plastic junk. This is the classic "Let me compare my iPhone 11 Pro to this Alcatel 1" - well the iPhone 11 Pro is 25x the price. The Dell XPS 13 isn't cheap-feeling plastic junk, nor is the Thinkpad X1 carbon, nor is the Microsoft Surface Laptop. They're all premium products.
As an open source developer, it is very hard to support hardware that I don't actually own and can't test on.
It is also very hard to support obscure hardware that only has obfuscated closed-source drivers, or has no Linux drivers at all. This requires lots of trial-and-error and workarounds (in addition to the normal level of hardware-specific tweaks that have to go into something like libinput) and takes up a disproportionate amount of testing time. Some input devices fall in this category, such as those built into newer apple laptops.
Microsoft tried to compete with Apple by dictating to hardware vendors how they should write drivers for their touch input devices (the Microsoft HID guidelines). Of course, none of the hardware vendors could actually write drivers that fully conform to this standard, and the standard itself was not wholly adequate to compete with Apple. It causes problems.
Linux slavishly adheres to the published Microsoft HID guidelines. Since neither Microsoft nor any of the hardware vendors do, it causes problems.
The Microsoft HID guidelines dictate how packets of information are reported to userspace. That is information like touch id, touch size, velocity, and direction. The userspace then has to integrate the various data into touch and gesture recognition. A thousand different software developers do that a thousand different ways, mostly badly.
The end result in the Windows and Linux world is a thousand different developers produce touch and gesture recognition software a thousand different ways of hundreds of different devices that work in completely different ways. A sort of orchestrated chaos like an ant colony.
Apple dictated to its hardware vendors exactly how to write drivers that work with its software, and it has centralized software embedded in the OS to handle touch. A dozen expert developers do touch and gesture recognition for all apps using strictly controlled drivers from a select few vendors, all centrally controlled like a massive flock of starlings swooping and gliding and conducted by the ghost of Steve Jobs standing on the ground.
If old Surfaces had problems, the new ones don't. I've used a new MacBook and Surface daily for the last couple months, and the tracking performance and latency are indistinguishable. Haptic clicking is better on the Mac though.
I think it’s due to the organizational structure of Apple which gives them a huge advantage over everyone else. In the Linux world, people point the finger at the driver developers who in turn point the finger at the hardware makers and firmware developers. Apple, on the other hand, has all of these folks working together, all the way up the stack to the UI toolkit and application layers.
I fear that Linux touchpad support is a victim of Conway’s law [1] which means this problem can’t be solved by one specific team. It may mean rewriting the whole stack (and rewriting applications as a result).
the tl;dr is that when touchpads were added to windows, they used the legacy APIs which made assumptions about them being mouses with notched scroll wheels. And while microsoft has since released APIs which support high precision scrolling, applications have been slow to adopt them (sometimes because of wanting to be compatible with windows 7 and older).
Still atrocious touchpad experience? If you discount the constant jumping around, which I experienced on every precision driver touchpad I have used (about 4, including a Macbook. Are MS complete idiots or is this another one of the problems normal people don't notice?!?!?!?!) my experience with them has actually been very good.
The response is way more direct than on Linux and quite precise as well. Application support for scrolling is not great, but not horrible either (browsers, more popular MS apps and JetBrains IDEs work).
Surface trackpads feel very close to Apple ones these days so it's down to OEMs.
Although at this point I'd argue Microsoft should be forcing a minimum level of experience on all Windows devices and providing the software tools and hardware guidance needed to get there.
The only way that works is for Microsoft to refuse to license Windows to manufacturers that don't meet those standards, and you're not going to catch them refusing to make a sale.
Count me among those who agree there is a vast gulf. Another thing I've noticed recently is that on my X1 carbon (7th gen) there is a small but noticeably distance when I first start dragging a finger before the cursor moves that does not exist on a Mac trackpad with MacOS.
I also wonder what the experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad. Is it closer to the experience on MacOS or closer to the experience with Linux on commodity hardware? If the latter, maybe it makes sense to improve that first.
Maybe not though, if the synergy between hardware and software is the "secret sauce" that's missing then maybe optimizing the mac trackpad for Linux would be wasted effort.
Honestly, I don't think this is as difficult of a problem as we think. Has anybody tried scrolling in Windows UWP/Modern/RT apps with a precision touchpad? It's just as glorious. In fact, I've read many accounts of people who use pre-Chromium Edge just for the scrolling experience. Microsoft also ported this scrolling algorithm/profile to Chromium Edge, even if it's slightly less responsive (probably limited by win32)
If you don't like the scrolling in UWP it probably has more to do with it's acceleration graph than its capability. That, and macOS seem to just make their UI animations way smoother than anything I've seen on Windows and Linux. The Windows desktop switching and "expose" animation kills me every time it janks.
I don't know what's stopping Microsoft from porting this scrolling behavior to Win32, and to be fair it seem like they tried (scrolling in Explorer is noticeably different on a precision touchpad even though not as smooth) but probably they're held back by backward compatibility or that it's too much of an effort to make that pig fly.
My understanding about the smoothness of the animations in MacOS is that the animations interpolate along the gesture, versus being triggered only when the gesture is considered complete and thus registered.
Windows does that too, at least for desktop switching. It's above that actually, the way Apple implemented animations in general using Core Animations looks much smoother than Windows or Gnome in my experience.
To satisfy your curiosity about the performance of the MacBook Pro's touchpad in Linux... it's not great, especially if you just recently used it in OS X.
I haven't ran Linux on another machine in anger for a long time so I can't compare the between laptops.
I have run Linux on my old MBP 2015 though, and the trackpad is usable but as soon as you boot macOS again you realise how crap it was on Linux. Tweaking accels/speeds can bridge the gap a little but it's still not nearly as good.
I have used Linux (fedora-xfce) inside VMWare Fusion on Mac laptops on a daily basis for at least the last decade, and also have run Linux on Thinkpad and System76 hardware from time to time.
In general I find the trackpad experience of Linux-inside-VMWare-on-Mac to be basically identical to that directly on Mac, and much (much) better than either Linux on Thinkpad or on System 76.
There is some oddness in the VMWare setup- in the VMWare parent process, over time, RAM usage grows, and a slight lag is introduced into the UI experience inside Linux (both trackpad and keyboard).
When this gets too noticeable, I kill the VMWare parent (which does not kill the actual VMs), then restart it. The lag is eliminated, the memory leak is cleaned up, and the child VMs are not impacted.
I imagine the abstracted event flow to be:
HW -> Mac driver -> VMWare user space UI loop -> Linux generic driver -> Linux userspace
while the Linux only event flow would be
HW -> Linux driver -> Linux userspace
While there is some jankiness in VMWare's delivery of events to the generic Linux driver that the kernel uses for the VMWare "hardware", the work happening in the Mac driver is the magic that delivers great experience.
I few months ago I tried really hard to get smooth-scrolling on a Macbook pro running Windows/Linux vms. I was testing against VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, and native boot. I never got a satisfying result. Windows on hardware with specific software, like Edge, was the only environment I could get smooth scrolling. There was a lot of "it seems smooth to me" which made it harder to figure out if it was the hardware, VM, OS, or application (there are a lot of Firefox advanced settings to make it "Mac-like"--which aren't).
As for mouse movement, like you're saying it's pretty good in a VM when it's HW -> macOS -> sending X and Y values to the VM and guest OS.
Windows on hardware, even using Apple's drivers, is a bit "off." I lose drags, moving around is odd, and I feel like I have to be more deliberate with clicking. I never seem to have those issues when using Windows inside a VM.
Ran Linux on a MBP and had about the same experience as my thinkpad. It was when I reinstalled MacOS that I had a serious user shock. After configuring there was still a noticeable quality of life disparity between the two and I spent the next couple months training myself to deal with it while pining for Linux.
I run Linux on one MBP and MacOS on another and I have a dissenting opinion that the MBP trackpad on Linux actually behaves extremely well. I have an X1 too and find the trackpad horrible in comparison.
I plug my magic trackpad 2 into my first-gen x1 carbon, and it works remarkably well for scrolling, clicking, getting around.
I miss some of the multi-touch features (three-finger-swipe-up) but it's pretty much identical excepting those. When I close the lid and plug in to a monitor, you can't tell much of a difference.
I want to believe that anything available in Fedora can be shoehorned into Arch but I suppose the trick is figuring out which component(s) is/are responsible.
>> experience is like using Linux on a Mac trackpad
I ran Lubuntu on a 2012 macbook pro for a couple years and it was much closer to an "Apple" experience compared to my current setup of Pop_OS on a P52S Thinkpad.
I can speak for the mac trackpad on windows via bootcamp, and the experience is noticeably worse. Even scrolling feels like I stepped into a time machine to 15 years ago.
Am I the only one who doesn't get this? Trackpads on Linux with various Thinkpads have always seemed fine. I've used trackpads on various Mac laptops (Pro and Air) and those have seemed fine also. To round things out, my experience with trackpads on Windows (Thinkpads and XPS) has been that they are fine.
Admittedly I have Linux set up for keyboard use with a TWM, but the trackpads, when I used them, have been fine.
As a loooooong time mac user recently using Linux as a daily driver again, it’s pretty bad. I would compare it to voice recognition: the difference between “90% there” and “95% there” is quite vast.
In addition to multi finger gestures, the biggest gaps for me are general handling of inertia, scrolling smoothness, ignoring accidental touches, fine grained pointer accuracy, and handling of alt-clicks(two finger right click, three finger middle-click, etc).
Again, it works, and is usable, but it feels like it was finished before the bar was raised on the trackpad User Experience.
For various reasons I've had to alternate between 2017 macbook pro and linux thinkpads - using only one or the other for a few months at a time (mac for 3 months, then thinkpad 3 months).
I didn't know there was a "trackpad meme" - but to me the thinkpad is fine, but unquestionably more frustrating than the mac. I've tried to tweak things but never made it feel good.
I even set up a camera at one point to try and figure out what was causing my frustrations. Looking at the footage I noticed even though the thinkpad felt slower (or a bit "sluggish"?) I would still often slightly over-shoot my target.
I can't figure out exactly why it's different but it sure feels like some sort of black magic on the macs part.
Even when I worked with a laptop alone, not my preference, I would always use an external mouse with my Linux machines. Sure, the trackpad technically worked, but the frustrations just slowly piled up to the point where carrying a mouse around was superior.
I hear you. While I wanted to use the trackpad on my X1 Carbon + Fedora , and really was good enough, I got frustrated on the "nudges" and "slides" I was experiencing while trying to hit very exact targets.
Then I got back to my MX2 Anywhere and it felt like a mile away.
It depends on the trackpad. I think part of the issue is that Linux doesn’t have much calibration beyond what the firmware on the trackpad is reporting.
The other issue is that PC laptops tend to have much smaller trackpads for whatever reason, allowing for less room for fine adjustments after swiping.
My old Asus UX305 feels as good as a Mac, the trackpad is large, the scrolling has momentum and feels good, etc.
On the other hand, my HP Envy trackpad is terrible, the palm detection doesn’t work well, the trackpad itself is too small to aim properly, the acceleration is pretty high and hard to aim. It almost seems like the team responsible for the design of the laptop never considered what it would be like to use such a small trackpad.
The hardware itself can certainly be a factor, but I don’t believe it’s the main issue as I run Linux on plenty of Apple hardware and it’s the same outcome.
In a previous post, the author mentions a few benchmarks comparing Mac vs Linux trackpad performance: https://archive.is/s7SZM
1. Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing. As of today, I can consistently score twice as high on macOS (average score 250 with “Hard” + “Small” options) vs Linux (average score ~100).
2. Visual or terminal-based means to configure rudimentary touchpad settings. The fewest options I could imagine supporting for v1 would be: scroll speed/acceleration, scroll speed, natural scrolling toggle, hopefully support for gestures.
Number 1 seems wildly subjective based on the person's level of dexterity and the hardware used. The only way I could see that being meaningful if you did it on the exact same laptop side by side with Mac and Linux and tweaked the acceleration profile, but it doesn't actually sound like the author is talking about installing Linux on a macbook.
Numbers 2 and 3 are already in libinput. I am still struggling to understand what it is the author feels they need to fork the project for; there is some additional software that needs to be provided to really get the mac-like desktop experience with gestures, but that is covered by the libinput-gestures project. https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures
Number 1 is like a relative benchmark on the same hardware, as compared to a production grade loadtest. While there’s no guarantee that any of us can match their performance, relative improvements matter.
I see what you mean but that still would require testing on the same hardware repeatedly to really get a picture of what is going on. Then you could potentially making some small tweaks to the acceleration profile, but it's really a tiny amount of code.
From somebody who worked on touch intefraces:
#1 could be hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads detects finger coordinates in firmware and send them to driver. Driver has not much to do to improve accuracy besides some high-level smoothing like Kalman filter.
#2 is could be useful. Not that tools are completely lacking, but they can use some polish and unification.
#3 is again hardware dependent. Most modern touchpads do palm detection in firmware. Nothing you can do to improve that. In the most cases it is not even possible to get a "raw" sensor reading.
>Linux touchpad scores on par with Macbook touchpad per mouseaccuracy.com testing
It looks like this doesn't take viewport size into account. A smaller window still shows dots of the same size, just distributed over a smaller area. Given that it's (more) idiomatic to maximize windows under Linux and Windows than under MacOS, those results could be skewed.
Well, on Windows and Linux, the maximize button almost always works, where on MacOS it does something, but after using one for work for 7 years, I still don't know what it's supposed to do. I'm not a big maximizer though, big desktop monitors and maximized windows aren't good for me.
Well, Windows and the most common Linux DEs make it easy to maximize windows, while on MacOS there's only a full screen button by default (which is not the same and most people probably don't want). My anecdotal observation has been that Mac users end up manually resizing windows often, to increase size to a large portion of the screen when necessary - but they don't fully maximize windows.
That's actually an interesting question, I'm not sure if anyone's looked at it. It probably depends heavily on your window manager of choice (some of them take the choice out of your hands).
For my part, I don't use a tiling window manager, and the only things I maximize sometimes are VM displays.
I feel the same. It almost seems like a meme to me by now.
I've used various different laptops (Macbooks, Windows machines, Linux-based ones, Chromebooks), and while the experience was certainly different, Macbooks never felt particularly superior. They seem to be configured (by default) to move cursors fairly slowly compared to the competition, but it's a lot about just getting used to it. There are of course some cheap, jumpy touchpads out there, but this doesn't apply to all non-Macbooks, by far.
I just booted a MacBook Air into Mint recently and I think I finally figured out what the difference is:
Mac allows the cursor to move quickly, but where it differs & excels is how fast it decelerates or stops the cursor.
On Linux, I am always overshooting what I'm trying to click on even when I make the mouse tracking speed very very slow. On Mac I can keep the tracking speed high and jump around quickly but still manage to stop right where I need to every time.
So either, it's faster to register you're slowing down/stopping OR it slows down at a faster rate than your finger is slowing down (vs faithfully tracking your finger)... or both?
Edit: This is true for the handling of external mice too, it's not just the trackpad. The difference is night and day, and overshooting things is frustrating with a normal mouse as well as the touchpad.
The acceleration curve on the Mac trackpad is unparalleled. I wonder if it’s possible to reverse engineer it using a mouse (or a “fake” mouse via a teensy or something). That being said, I can’t stand using a mouse with the same acceleration, I have to install an app to disable it.
Interesting. Lower latency? Or maybe doing some predictive slowing by over-accelerating the slowing as soon as it detects a change in speed or pressure?
You've hit the nail on the head. The real difference is input latency.
Tweaking acceleration curves will not help overcome latency of 2-3 frames which is common on Linux compositors (33-50 ms of delay, causing target overshoots).
I'm thinking either sensitivity is lowered as deceleration begins, or deceleration is over-emphasized as you say. I can move really fast then stop completely dead even as I'm sure my by-no-means-steady hands are not that precise and are probably still very slightly moving as I'm "stopped".
This is a perfect description of input latency. You stop moving your finger over the target, but the cursor keeps moving for another 33-50ms, causing you to overshoot.
I have a thinkpad X1 1gen and the trackpad in almost every distro is really bad. Single tap moves the mouse, making me fail almost every click on small things.
I've been testing out various flavors of Linux (Ubuntu 20.04, Pop!OS, etc.) this past week on both a fairly new Thinkpad and a Macbook Pro and the trackpad experience is horrible compared to Windows or MacOS.
Things I've noticed:
- Mouse jumps after thumb-clicking.
- Thumb doesn't get ignored when doing certain combination actions (thumb + click and drag to select multiple items).
- Scrolling isn't 'inertial'
- Mousing around lacks some of the accelation/deceleration that makes getting around a screen easier.
(bias: I spent a lot of time thinking about the mac touchpad and once wrote an app leveraging it's privateframework data).
I'm really tempted to find time to help on this effort, but it likely requires getting another machine since I can't see myself living in linux full-time for a while.
Interesting list. Seems we use a touchpad differently because I don't use my thumb at all on it and don't like inertial scrolling or movement.
> Scrolling isn't 'inertial'
It seems different applications have different scrolling settings. I'm on Ubuntu, on Firefox there is inertial scrolling (smooth scrolling setting), on Chrome there isn't.
I get this one on Windows with my touchpad (with Microsoft's 'precision' driver) but not Linux.
One that I don't like about the Macbook touchpad is that the cursor won't move for a short period after clicking, which makes it hard to click stuff quickly
My experience is that palm rejection on my Mac laptop works flawlessly (I literally cannot remember ever having an issue with my palm interfering), but on my Dell/Win10 I get frustrated on a daily basis.
I have no idea about linux, scrolling on windows is pretty much hardcoded to use a early 2000s scroll wheel mouse.
Because of their low resolution, windows scrolling is done one text line at a time, while macs scroll a pixel at a time.
This sounds superficial, but it is really not. With the higher resolution, you get a very direct connection with the scrolled content. Without this almost tactile feedback, inertial scrolling doesn’t work at all.
And since scrolling is like 90 % of what I use a trackpad for, I will not even consider using windows with a trackpad until they have fixed it.
The tactile feedback comes from the fact Mac OS has the concept of a scroll having an amount of inertia behind it, if I very gently move two fingers up and down on a long web page then it will very gently move a few pixels, but if I flick two fingers from the bottom of the touchpad to the top then its going to go flying upwards. If I then put a finger down on the touchpad it'll stop the scroll immediately.
This behaviour one of the things in Mac OS that nobody really notices because it feels so intuitive, but if you took it away everyone would be puzzling over why scrolling feels broken.
I feel like things are a little better in the regular users (modern stock GNOME) chunk of Linux land: Wayland / GDK / GTK handle touchpad gestures as well as "smooth" scroll events, which are sent in combination with regular (coarse-grained) touchpad scroll events. Works out of the box in GTK 3 applications, so as an application developer all you have to do (if you're targeting GNOME) is not use a dead version of GTK :b GTK 3 even does scroll inertia: https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkScrolledWindow.ht.... Firefox started supporting this stuff recently, as well.
I think the story is similar for Windows, but a little less satisfying since their hodepodge of UI toolkits starts from the very core, whereas at least with modern desktop Linux distros the core apps are generally implemented the same way.
Alas, mouse wheels are a whole other story. Pixel perfect scroll wheels have been a thing for a while, and Windows actually has support for these (not that it works anywhere). Support in Linux has been progressing at a similarly glacial pace, but it looks really promising. That's one spot where Apple is definitely years ahead. (If only they would make a practical mouse…).
Is this why touchpad scrolling is so crazy in LibreOffice? On windows, mouse and scrollwheel works fine in Libre. Using touchpad it shoots the document to the moon each time scrolling gestures are applied.
There is not a similar effect in other applications.
Probably. Google maps used to have huge problems with zooming (since it was meant to use the scroll wheel), as did a lot of games that relied on the mouse wheel to cycle through an inventory.
I don't know about Thinkpads, but I've owned over a dozen Dell laptops. Their touchpads have been between Terrible to OK on Linux. Until my most recent Dell, the Precision 5510 (the business version of XPS 15). Finally almost as good as a Mac, but very slightly not as good on palm rejection.
I stopped buying Macs due to the ESC key, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the removal of USB-A ports, so I'm very happy to have the Precision 55xx options.
Strangely enough, my only other laptop whose trackpad as almost as good as the Mac is my cheapo Chromebook.
Also don't quite get it, but I think this is only about the software side. For example gestures with more than two fingers, better scrolling (continuous not steps).
I get it, but I also get why lots of people don't. There is something of a subjectivity in "what feels good" for using a hardware interface device, which some people simply won't notice. Sort of like the difference between a pretty UI and an ugly one (assuming the function is the same), some people care and some people don't. Neither one is wrong, but experience isn't universal.
All of that together, the end-to-end latency between moving your finger and the result appearing on screen. The trackpad firmware & driver, the display compositor, the hardware cursor overlay (or lack thereof) combine to give you the total latency which makes using a non-mac touchpad frustrating.
You can observe this effect by comparing a magic trackpad 2 vs the internal macbook trackpad, when connected over bluetooth: there is a small but noticeable latency that makes the external trackpad less precise and less "fun" to use than the internal one.
Edit: you can observe the same difference between a standard corded mouse vs a bluetooth mouse. Or, in my case, a 125Hz USB mouse vs my PS2 mouse back in the Windows XP days - the difference was night and day.
The people who both think like this and are core developers of the input stack are literally the reason we cannot have nice things.
"Here, it's moving, what else do you want?"
The input experience in Linux is an example of the "Soviet style" pattern. Quoting the "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies" book:
"You have probably used some of these Soviet-style products that do more or less what they are intended to do but in a way that you find awkward or irritating. You find that the products’ usability is not what it should be; their look and feel is unattractive; they lack certain security aspects you feel are needed; or they contain cultural references you find disconcerting or offensive. These are failures to meet the products’ non-functional requirements—those that make them appealing to the humans who use them. Such requirements are every bit as important for eventual acceptance as the functional requirements."
Whys and hows of this are also explained in this attempt: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/172/. TL;DR is that to make a good design for anything, be it a city park, or a gas stove, or a software product, you need to widen your comfort zone to include other people besides yourself.
There are three things at play here that give Apple/OS X their unique advantage:
1) Size. I have huge hands. A 2015 MBP has a trackpad whose size I have yet to see on any Windows/Linux laptop. I'm too clumsy for IBM's trackpad and the tiny "touchpads" on usual laptops should rather be called "touchpadlets" because they are so small that most I have experienced have had my fingers awkwardly collide. I won't go back on non-Apple hardware until there is a decently wide offering of decently sized touchpads.
2) Drivers. Back with my last Windows laptop it was some Elantech touchpad with Elantech drivers. Installing some random drivers from some random other laptop on a forum hint somewhere in the 30th Google result area suddenly gave me a whole lot of gestures. Just... WTF? Why is this not a core OS component in Windows and has it been possible over the last five years (since I switched) to finally use gestures OOTB in Linux?!
3) OS primitives / integration. Windows and (IIRC, please correct me!) Linux operate on the concept of "steps" with absolute scroll delta values, while OS X (and iOS/Android) operates on ... I don't even know what, it simply feels utterly smooth instead of janky. But I also assume that this is the most difficult to fix :(
Am I the only one who prefers the red nubs on on Thinkpads? I find it very hard to use any touchpads. When I used a mac, I would carry around a mouse. I wish thinkpads would get rid of the touchpad. I'm perfectly happy with just using the nub.
One think I dont like about them though, is that I have to make the choice whether the middle button is native windows scroll, or thinkpad scroll. The native scroll allows me to middle click links, tabs, windows, but has a delay that makes it almost unusable for scroll. The thinkpad scroll is beautiful, but now the button doesnt function as middle click.
If I choose to use native windows scroll, I end up using 2 finger scroll on the touchpad to counter the trackpoints inability to scroll correctly.
Are there any laptops with two nubs: one for the mouse, one for scrolling? Then one could also put the keyboard in a more comfortable position right where the touchpad is now.
It’s funny that people want this so badly that the site has been down for me the whole time it’s been on the front page yet it’s still getting upvoted to the top.
It seems to me, at least as someone on the outside of this debate looking in, that people are having some trouble defining what "better" actually means. I think if the difference could be quantified, it could be addressed.
Ken Kocienda talks about this in his book Creative Selection. While working at Apple, they identified processes that needed to optimized with heuristics as opposed to algorithms. Some things need to be tweaked by a person and cannot be solved by applying an algorithm. He posits that this is the reason Apple has traditionally had such a great user experience with the products.
Sure, it could be more fine-tuned, but it works just fine that way.
On other laptops I've had to reduce the "finger size" (I can't remember the name of the setting), so I could use it even with a light touch, but that's the biggest problem I've had with it so far.
Are you actually using exec before each xinput command? If so, only your first xinput command actually gets run. exec replaces the currently running process, effectively making it run-this-and-exit.
Looks like & saves the day by invoking the command in a subshell and then in that subshell exec replaces the subshell with the xinput command. E.g. you can test it by
1) how exactly are you planning to cooperate with upstream (meaning Peter Hutterer, meaning Red Hat)? Suppose someone does the work, then what? libinput has issues open for years, including issues that have patches, how are you going to make sure yours is not going to get buried?
2) if there existed a programmer both capable and willing to pull this off, wouldn’t it make sense for them to set up sponsorship themselves and cut the middleman out?
It was posted there while it was a draft on his blog, before it was actually finished. The links which were the purpose of the post hadn’t been setup yet.
> I presume nobody is randomly visiting pages on bill.harding.blog, so you aren't seeing this.
For whatever it's worth/if it helps with this journey - the trackpad on the surface book/surface laptops is the closest I've seen to the mac trackpads. I'm assuming it's some combination of hardware and software. From stricly a tracking/responsiveness perspective, I would say they're dead even. I like the multi-finger click options better on MacOS - I'm sure it would be trivial for Microsoft to implement if they wanted to.
A few years ago I was dual booting Arch on a 2013 Macbook Pro and couldn't for the life of me get the trackpad working nicely as it would on MacOS. Up until then I'd made the assumption that Apple trackpads felt the way they did mostly due to hardware. When writing code I'm using vim and am keyboard focused but I've become really used to browsing websites and docs using the trackpad on MacOS.
with my work enforced MBP most of the time i want to right click i end up clicking and triggering an unintended consequence just because i have my two fingers too close. On linux i never had this happen even on the cheapest touchpads.
That surprises me, I just tried very hard to smash my fingers together to make it think I was using one finger (I was using the Magic Trackpad, but I also tried on my 16" MBP) and it always registered a right click.
I actually can't think of the last time I misclicked a right click on Mac.
Can we also talk about pinch and zoom (e.g. image viewer or browser)? It seems that gesture is totally artificial for desktop Linux (we have it on Android though) and there are not even API interfaces existing for that trackpad gesture.
Hoping all Linux input libraries will get a lot more attention and funding in the future :)
No way this is just a matter of paying a freelancer $50K. If that was it then System76 would have done it and someone would be rich from selling a closed source driver already.
And software doesn't even touch the problem that most of what's wrong with non-Mac touchpads is the universally lousy hardware.
This is a solved problem, isn't it? On my Dell M6800 with Ubuntu 16.04, the touchpad experience is very poor, I avoid using it. On my (Linux based after all) Chromebook Pixel (anno 2013) it's fine, never been tempted to connect a mouse.
Perhaps I should clarify: the difference is also a difference in usage: on the Chromebook I use the trackpad almost exclusively to select the current window or scroll its content, rarely set the cursor or highlight some text to be copied (the latter is already more challenging than with a mouse, I'd say). I haven't attempted to use a CAD program using the touch pad yet. So the touchpad works mostly fine for what a Chromebook is useful for, it's no replacement for a mouse on a workstation.
Hardware-wise, I'm extremely satisfied with Blade Stealth late 2019 one. However, (on popOS) there's a slight issue with palm rejection. I occasionally activate it with my palm. Is there a way to make rejection more aggressive?
If anyone is curious to see what people think about Linux touchpads currently, here are some of the preliminary results with 9000 responses counted thus far:
A few comments here have mentioned that MacBook touchpad development is tied to iPhone touchscreen R&D. This might be stating the obvious, but could a similar effort be made by leveraging Android touchscreen R&D and code for Linux? [1]
I'm just curious what exactly the deficiency is on touchpads with Linux? I have a fairly commodity Acer laptop (Swift 3 w/ Ryzen APU), and the touchpad is accurate, sensitive (no noticeable lag at all), two finger scrolling works, tap to click works with one, two and three fingers, etc... I haven't changed any settings except sensitivity and whatnot in the standard Ubuntu settings GUI.
Whatever you think of Apple, for some reason there is a huge gap in their trackpads and basically everything else I've tried. There is the way the physical trackpad feels and doesn't "stick" as well as the responsiveness and accuracy of the drivers.
That's not a real answer though. What objective difference is there? From some replies it might be software in the OS that changes the acceleration of the cursor, so that'd be an answer if true.
Personally, I hate the feel of MacOS. The cursor seems unnaturally slow and when you crank up the speed has some weird behaviour.
Appologies the answer was a bit flakey and yes you have a point it might be that I'm just very used to it and to me it feels better, as to you it feels worse. I mentioned in another comment on here that I wasn't able to get anything close to the feeling of the MacOS trackpad from using the same hardware on linux. I suppose the person who wrote this article feels the same way that I do about it.
Fair enough. I guess I don't get a lot of the complaints when people talk about 'feel' because I've never like the MacOS 'feel'. Linux touchpads are plenty accurate and precise IMO so I've never understood why people say they're 'bad'. There doesn't seem to be any actual deficiency, just a lack of features that Apple bakes into the OS.
Given how much developer-contempt there is for the new touchpads, its amazing to me that the opposite of this has not been tried by hardware hackers already (as far as I know).
That is, hacking in an old tactile (non-touchpad) keyboard into the top section of the latest Macbook Pros.
Personally I use the Apple Magic Trackpad. It's just a giant slab on my desk and it's great (Don't even use a mouse).
But I use that with a Mac, so it depends on what you are using.
I disable my Touchpad, not because of any shortcomings it might have, but because one of the selling points of a ThinkPad for me is the Trackpoint. I can operate it fine without moving my hands from the home typing position with my thumb's on the mouse buttons.
- Take the Linux Touchpad Experience Poll: https://www.gitclear.com/polls/linux_touchpad_experience
- Become a sponsor on GitHub: https://github.com/gitclear/libinput (GitHub matches every donation up to $5k, so your $5 can become $10)
- Get paid $50/hr to work on libinput: http://archive.is/FGHTT (link to archive of the original article ty danso)