[bscphil]

> like bad keyboards, bad trackpad (too much scrolling, jagged scrolling, bad trackpad surface)

Curious to hear more about the keyboard / trackpad issues you're seeing. I have an older XPS model, which has the best laptop keyboard I've ever used (better than any MacBook I've tried) and a great trackpad too (I haven't used a MacBook from the last several years, but it's hard to beat physical left/right buttons).

Has the touchpad changed? Mine is extremely smooth, it does not stick to your finger at all, and has no texturing on the surface like cheap laptops sometimes do.

Furthermore, I'm curious if you've tried Linux on the laptop at all. In the past, most issues I had with "bad" trackpads (other than when the surface itself was bad) were resolved by installing Linux, where the drivers simply worked better than on Windows and were generally more configurable (although the advent of libinput changed that).

[ypcx]

My 7590's keyboard is the polar opposite of the new Macbook butterfly keyboard which is considered too slim/tight/short-key-travel -- the Dell's keyboard is harder to press, they keys wiggle (this is exacerbated on the big keys like the Spacebar) -- a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard. (And even much more so after getting used to the Macbook's short travel keyboard (2018 mbp pro)).

Interesting, last time I checked (years ago), Linux was abhorrent when it came to trackpad support.

And you are actually right that the trackpad surface on XPS in particular is actually one of the better/best ones. However options for tweaking it in Windows settings is non-existent, and so it is much slower than the mac trackpad, and my finger end up fatigued from casual scrolling, which never happens on mac. (This (trackpad scrolling speed) is tweakable eg in VSCode but not in Chrome etc.)

[bscphil]

> a fast touch typer will hate this keyboard

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.

[EugeneOZ]

My son has the same model. The keyboard is not that bad, I even like it. But issues with the sleep mode and with the trackpad - they overweight everything and I’ve bought an M1 Air for him.