Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.
> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.
This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.
Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.
Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.
Interesting. On this site, I see nothing but complaints about the Macbook short travel keyboards. I have not used one for more than a few minutes, but I am a fast touch typist and I like the greater travel with my XPS keyboard. It's a whole lot better feeling than the 2014 MBP I have compared it with; the latter has more travel than newer Macbooks but has a mushy, foam-like feel to its switches rather than the firmer, actuator-like feel that I'm used to with the XPS.
> last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.
This depends a lot on the features you're expecting, and also whether you have a touchpad that's compatible with good drivers or not. For a long time the multi-touch story on Linux wasn't great, so users coming from Macs and expecting to use 3, 4 or 5 finger gestures were inevitably disappointed. I find myself not really using these gestures, even when I use a Mac (I bind keyboard shortcuts to my most used functions with Karabiner instead), so it doesn't matter much to me.
Rather, I'm comparing the behavior of a certain class of low quality touchpad that you find in cheap laptops. In Windows, I've seen these touchpads jerk around, not really detect your finger properly, have weird acceleration ramps, and have bad palm rejection - seemingly issues with the touchpad itself, yet become vastly improved when switching the laptop over to Linux, provided that you could use the synaptics driver.
Stuff like trackpad scrolling speed has of course always been configurable system wide on Linux, along with many other features. It's even available in the libinput driver, which (unfortunately) got rid of most of the "knobs" for touchpads.