hi , i took the plunge 3 weeks ago , its been hard going (WiFi was tedious!) but my 2012 macbook air is running the latest chrome , not quite feeling like home but .. thanks Fedora.
Reason for writing ; the trackpad is so unmac like i am feeling homesick - i have some kind of shim to slow down the cursor , toshy to give my muscle memory the mac key shortcuts but the thing that is driving me mad is that palms , thumbs , hairs …keep touching the trackpad an interrupting my typing , its causing so much wasted time .
(Turning off tap to click is not an option im afraid.)
Please fedora ; contact your pal at apple and port the proper drivers for my lovely mac book air , it does not need to be scrapped but we cant go on like this.
You don’t say which desktop you are using, but there’s a Touchpad setting panel in KDE which will probably allow you to turn off the touchpad when typing… Can’t tell you for definite as I don’t have a touchpad and as there’s nothing to configure, the settings don’t display for me.
Gnome probably has something similar though… unless the Gnome devs have declared that to require an extension too.
Fedora packages what upstream linux devs provide. A few years ago there were devs making sure Linux supported Apple gear properly because they used it themselves, but many of those people are aging out or moving to much higher paid AI jobs.
Are you using the Apple USB BCM5974 multitouch driver?
The Apple multi-touch trackpads report both mouse and keyboard events via different interfaces of the same usb device. This creates a race condition with the HID driver, which, if not told otherwise, will find the standard HID mouse and keyboard, and claim the whole device. To remedy, the usb product id must be listed in the mouse_ignore list of the hid driver.
You can search for your model on https://linux-hardware.org to see what works for other linux users on your hardware.
Aye - I would staggered if there wasn’t such a thing. Maybe it doesn’t work as expected on a Mac… no idea - my only Mac was a PowerPC G5 and it was last seen being thrown into a skip a few years ago.
Which desktop environment are you using? Are you on GNOME? KDE? Or something else? You could disable the trackpad only while you are typing. There are many ways to do that. But I’d need some information to help you with that if you haven’t found a solution yet.
See this (somewhat old but still relevant I guess) thread about touchpad sensitivity.
Regarding keyboard shortcuts and muscle memory, there are ways to swap the Cmd and Ctrl keys. See this thread if you’re on GNOME. For KDE Plasma, I remember seing the setting somewhere in Plasma’s default settings app.
thanks to all the folks who advised. i do have BCM5974 trackpad , my command , copy , paste etc. is quite mac like thanks to ‘toshy’ , it is not really satisfactory but turning off tap to click in the trackpad control has stopped the cursor flying off randomly.
re all the kind recomendations for other lines of enquriy ; i dont really have the skills to faff about under the hood with drivers and from how things went with the wifi driver it could likely ruin the setup if we start fiddling about.
Support for old machines often breaks if nobody with your model participates in prerelease testing. Having tested USB alternatives for keyboard, mouse, and WiFi can be helpful while waiting for fixes. Your system may need a USB hub to get enough ports.
