Framework Laptop 16

I’ve never missed having buttons on the macbook trackpad lol

How are they slower/impossible?

Because the macbook trackpad is good.

Problem is none of the trackpad on PC are as good as the Apple trackpad

I assume some gestures are simply not possible. Like click-to-drag and scroll simultaneously. Not every app handles gutter-hover-to-scroll in a usable way. On a mouse or a pad with buttons, you can keep the left click held down and scroll with the wheel or gesture. Uni-pads make this impossible.

You assume it wrong. You can click-to-drag and scroll simultaneously without issues on an Apple trackpad.

Hardware-wise, no, I've had plenty of PC trackpads that are better than Apple trackpads. But MacOS tends to have better built-in support for advanced gestures, which seem to be impossible on Windows and must be manually configured on Linux (but gives you enormous power once you do).

... it's a software problem afaik. The trackpad may be slightly better quality, but it's the drivers and the OS integration that make even some games playable without a mouse on Mac OS.

Don't think any one x86 laptop manufacturer can fix it.

I've missed them every time I've been in the unfortunate position of dealing with someone else's macOS system. It's all a matter of what you're accustomed to.

GNOME on Wayland has lots of useful gestures out of the box. It's part of the DE though, so lots of DEs don't have them.

Using Gnome (for whatever reason), I'm used to two finger scrolling and three finger swiping just working by default.

Apple's palm rejection is also top tier, though other systems have been getting better. My current Dell seems fine so far, but at my last company the Dell I had was almost unusable due to my cursor just teleporting around my document randomly if my hands got too close to the trackpad (which is where they have to be to type).

Not sure if it's a hardware (Dell) or software (Ubuntu) improvement, but thank god.

How does that work? You've got to tap the touchpad to trigger the initial click, don't you? For some reason, I really HATE tapping a touchpad (let that be an Apple or otherwise), it breaks my flow, I suppose? (like, you have to pause at the cursor's location, lift, tap twice to initiate a dragging event, then finally move on) whereas on the ThinkPad I daily drive I do all the cursor movement/scrolling with my right hand and the selection/clicking with my left thumb on the physical key that sits on the top of the touchpad sensitive area. That makes click&drag workflows super efficient, I find.

You click and drag with one finger and you are free to scroll with two other fingers during the drag. It is a multitouch gesture. (I don't use "tap to click" since I always found it cumbersome)

"Without issues" is a stretch. You need to use two hands or be skilled with one. Its trivial on a mouse or a pad with a discrete buttons.

But ok, what about just dragging a long distance where you would normally lift the mouse or finger? Is there some hidden gesture for this? Maybe once your initial drag finger hits the edge you need to use two more to do a move gesture? But I've seen that trigger scroll and/or pinch-to-zoom.

Just for me to understand, you navigate to that thing you want to drag, then press harder (without the double-tap+move in short sequence, do there's that), and that registers a drag event?

Could you do the "press harder" part with, e.g. a thumb in an other region of the touchpad instead of the finger that did the navigation?

You could try putting a trackpad from a macbook into the framework. AFAIK the palm rejection is all in the firmware. The apple trackpad is USB. If you look at the code for Asahi Linux it could tell you more.

Yes, you can. As long as one finger is "pressing hard-ish" a second finger can command the drag position, but if the finger that is pressing (you do not need to press very hard to trigger a click) is not the one that is also moving, then you will have issues when also scrolling with two other fingers, because at that point you have 4 fingers touching the trackpad, and by default you get anoter gesture registered (probably a zoom out to see all the windows in the workspace, called "expose"). If the fingers touching the trackpad are "only" three, you can drag and scroll, with the window that receives the scroll being the one under the pointer/item being dragged.

> what about just dragging a long distance where you would normally lift the mouse or finger?

This is why you set Trackpad speed to "fastest", and take advantage of the aggressive trackpad acceleration. When you move your finger quickly you'll easily reach the far side of the screen before your finger reaches the edge of the pad, and slow finger movements will still be precise

I'm probably missing some context, but on my Mac I'm using three fingers drag and I can lift fingers and (quickly) reposition them without breaking the drag.

Thanks for clarifying, it seems analogous to having a physical mouse button, then (except that the haptic feedback is simulated, which strangely isn't off-putting to most, I've personally always felt the sensation uncanny)

I have the external apple trackpad (the most recent usb-c version at that) and this click-to-drag and then attempting to scroll does not work on Linux. Seems like this might have been a particular attention to detail on part of macOS devs.

As far as I know touchpad implementations just report finger locations and its up to software to interpret what a combination of these gestures means.

Even Apple's palm rejection is not good enough for me. I really hated the huge touchpad when I was using a Mac.

This reminded me of a feature in windows where if you were dragging something and reached the end of the touchpad, the cursor would continue on the same trajectory as long as you kept your finger at the edge of the touchpad. Then you could overshoot a little so you could bring your fingers back to the middle to regain maneuverability. I haven't missed it since I switched to linux but now that I'm thinking about it that was a very nice touch (no pun intended).

They said the mac solution is slower than discrete buttons, I’m contesting that part specifically

I stand by what I said. It may not be slower for you.