The two last issues facing users switching are (imo) battery management and track pads. I know there are solutions but they're very complicated to setup properly for the average user.

▲

ziml77 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I was messing around with a Framework laptop about a year ago and was amazed at how awful trackpad support is. If the default acceleration curves are going to be garbage, at least give me an easy way to edit them. Dealing with a config file sucks compared to being able to move sliders and feel the changes immediately.

And then kinetic scrolling is poorly supported. If you want it for every application you can turn it on at the driver level, but that doesn't work right because it is the wrong level to handle it at. It has no concept of your active application so it will continue your momentum between applications if you happen to alt-tab right after scrolling.

▲

Cyan488 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Libinput is adding Lua scripting to handle hardware quirks and edge cases without needing to rely on hardcoding hacks into the library[1], which might help the trackpad situation.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/libinput-Lua-Plugin-System

▲

shmerl 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lenovo laptops have good trackpad support on Linux.

▲

drpixie 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Is that really still a problem? I've always had trackpads work straight-off 100%, and find battery life to be way better under linux (perhaps because it's not running a million unwanted services.)

▲

greazy 2 days ago | parent [-]

What laptop and which os are you running?

I'm thinking taking an existing laptop (say hp), installing debian variant.

I'd be intrigued what other options are out there as I'm trying to move the whole family over

▲

arp242 2 days ago | parent [-]

Trackpads pretty much always work out of the box, but typically do not support more advanced features, and/or they're kind of a pain to set up. I think you and the person you're replying to are talking about different things(?)

Whether these advanced features are desirable is of course a matter of opinion. Personally, I find macbooks very hard to use because the trackpad never does what I want on account of having the motor skills of a spastic five year old. So I don't miss this at all.

	▲	greazy 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree they work out of the box but badly. I use non of the advanced features (gestures) of trackpads apart from two fingers to right click. I still struggle with most trackpads on linux. On mac I disable nearly all gestures, I prefer the keyboard shortcuts. You are right though, we're probably all talking about different aspects of trackpad usage.