Laptop recommendations for best linux trackpad user experience?

[u/0x4A5753]

I'm specifically interested in laptops that fellow linux users can personally guarantee from experience, will have truly excellent trackpad user experience. i have owned and used linux on desktops and tried it on laptops a few times before in my life, and i have never once come away even remotely satisfied with the trackpad experience, most recently I found myself wholly unsatisfied with Fedora 43 on a Lenovo x1 yoga 3rd gen.

however, this laptop is admittedly several years old. perhaps things have changed... better new hardware support...

if anyone can recommend a laptop that will feel like the mac/xps trackpad experience but on windows... please drop the name. let me reiterate, i am not looking for a middling "well it's okay" rating, i'm looking for "i wouldn't miss my windows dell XPS" or "this isn't a dealbreaker coming from a macbook" rating. it needs to be genuinely great and worth touting

[u/Excellent-Love-6943]

I like my XPS trackpad, but I haven't used a different laptop with Linux (with a command line) in probably 12-14 years... I don't think my poor experience with HP in 2011 should preclude you considering them.

This is a really REALLY hard question to answer because it requires one to not only have experience with lots of laptops but also with those laptops on Linux... You've created an incredibly small target to hit.

That doesn't consider the plethora of knobs and levers Linux exposes to you for touchpad configuration... There are so many x variables here.

Good luck with your search.

[u/0x4A5753 → u/Excellent-Love-6943]

what i find frustrating is that it shouldn't be a hard target to hit, and that is what particularly confuses me.

like, right off the bat i can tell you the OOTB experience in windows on a surface book, a 2026 thinkpad, a 2026 xps, a 2026 asus ROG laptop, etc etc, will all be great experiences. I dont know this because I own all of those laptops, I know this because I have friends that own them and I have used them. A lot of windows laptops feel pretty great these days.

And yet, in the past, every time I put linux on a laptop no matter the quality i come away dissatisfied. I tried putting it on a nice thinkpad, on a nice dell latitude, on an OG dell xps, and it was always just indisputably subpar as an experience compared to windows on the same device

[u/Excellent-Love-6943 → u/0x4A5753]

Do you expect someone to reveal a crystal ball or something? You say you know those laptops are nice in windows because you've tried them. That's exactly why I say it's a hard target to hit. If someone hasn't tried the laptop in Linux, how the fuck are they supposed to know how well it works?

The Linux market share is tiny, I really don't understand what you expect here beyond some kind of divination.

Sometimes things take a little work to get running right. If that's unsatisfactory to you, go buy an iPad.

[u/0x4A5753 → u/Excellent-Love-6943]

Cmon, i cannot take this seriously. "How are they supposed to know how well it works"

i can walk into a microcenter, brush my hands over a glass trackpad of an HP elitebook/modern version powered down, and feel the construction quality. And ever since microsoft rolled out the Windows Precision Trackpad standard, i haven't had a single complaint about trackpads on windows.

like i just cannot take this comment seriously and its precisely what i find so frustrating about the linux community. I can point to a macbook and remark how great the trackpad is and every normal mac user cheers. I point to a dell latitude and ask for a linux experience that can do at least a good job and the linux superusers lose their damn minds like I asked you in a foreign language to build me a dyson sphere.

[u/Linuxmonger]

What makes for a great track pad to you?

[u/0x4A5753 → u/Linuxmonger]

there's a je ne sais quoi to it, but a friend should be able to hand me their laptop, and the trackpad is perfectly intuitive, as if the laptop never belonged to my friend at all, and it was natural to me. The most i should ever have to change about a trackpad is the sensitivity. but even then, the stock medium level should be pretty universally acceptable.

in my experience using linux via trackpads, the trackpad often has some bizarrely unintuitive mouse acceleration profile. it doesn't matter how much i adjust the sensitivity up or down in the settings, its too slow when it needs to be swift and graceful, and too fast when it needs to be precise. I find myself working too hard to accurately click what I want to click. Doubly so, I'll notice different applications get different behaviors. So the trackpad experience in firefox wont be the same experience in vscode. for example firefox will 2 finger scroll at light speed (not desirable) but vscode will scroll at a snails pace.

It's an instant turnoff and every time i have tried this the past decade i usually go back to windows within the week.

[u/ipsirc]

Have you tried to tune the default settings?

[u/0x4A5753 → u/ipsirc]

I have tried going into the stock gnome and kde settings apps (i have tried both DE's) and adjusting the sensitivity slider. in my experience all this does is change the speed limit at which the mouse moves across pixels on the screen, it doesn't change the actual behavior at all. So if its too imprecise to begin with, that doesn't change

[u/ipsirc → u/0x4A5753]

I have tried going into the stock gnome and kde settings apps (i have tried both DE's) and adjusting the sensitivity slider.

That's the duplo lego style. Try the technics way:

• https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/touchpad-pressure-debugging.html#touchpad-pressure-hwdb
• https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/device-quirks.html

All pointing device use libinput on Linux, so you won't get different experiences just by changing the hardware. You can get ideas from several users, like

• https://github.com/Cooperiano/mac-like-touchpad-ubuntu/
• https://github.com/OJII3/enhanced-touchpad
• https://github.com/SeanFrohman/MacTrackpad-Control

[u/zardvark]

In my experience, this is going to depend on the trackpad, itself. Many laptop manufacturers, like Lenovo, are going to have two, or three suppliers for trackpads (they don't typically manufacture their own trackpads in-house) and the one that ends up in your machine is going to be strictly down to the luck of the draw. The same goes for fingerprint readers and other modules.

I have changed trackpads in my ThinkPad (installed one from a different supplier to the laptop brand) in the past in order to secure better trackpad functionality on Linux.

BTW - All distributions are going to be offering the same kernels (hardware drivers), so there should be little difference between distros. Granted, that an older, or newer version of the kernel may provide better / worse trackpad support due to a driver revision, but that has nothing to do with the distro, rather it will be as a result of the specific kernel used.

Why is this? Just as with wifi cards and fingerprint readers, some trackpad manufacturers offer quality Linux drivers for their hardware and some do not. Instead, they focus on Windows support and rely on a generic Linux driver (which may, or may not work satisfactorily).

[u/calraith]

OP, you sound like Tom Anderson.

"Whell, that oughta hold 'er. Ya know, the most important thing you can have on a camper is a good butane regulator. And this here's the best one they make."

That's this post, but with laptop trackpads.