[agraddy]

My experience is that the touchpad on Chromebooks is high quality and really nice (I prefer it to a lot of other touchpads I've worked with). I can also boot fully into Linux (slightly different than what is described in the tweets), however when using Linux, the touchpad becomes terrible.

I'm guessing if I spent time figuring out the proper drivers I could probably get it working nice on Linux too but it just hasn't been worth the effort for me.

I really like the keyboard too, but I think that is probably more individual taste.

[fragmede]

You’re looking for https://galliumos.org/, which takes the touchpad drivers out of chromeos and puts them into an xfce4 Linux distro

[agraddy]

Thanks so much! I figured there was something out there but really didn't want to spend the time looking for it.

[Wowfunhappy]

> My experience is that the touchpad on Chromebooks is high quality and really nice

Have you used the really cheap ones though? I have had very bad experiences with the touchpads on ChromeOS devices used by schools.

[wildrhythms]

Yes, the older Chromebooks have some terribly inconsistent trackpad experiences. There is an older Acer model (circa 2017) that had one of the worst I've ever seen... way too sensitive even with the settings adjusted, palm detection didn't seem to work at all, and after just a month or two of normal use trackpads started double-activating (we had a whole fleet of these!)

Newer models are better. I'm sure software updates have fixed a lot of the palm detection issues. But similar situation with Windows laptops, PC notebook manufacturers are 20 years behind Apple on trackpads.