Finally, an external trackpad that's not from Apple

I mentioned last year that how I almost always preferred trackpads over mice, and Apple was always the only manufacturer of external trackpads, and my 2 Apple Magic Trackpads both have swollen batteries and need to be replaced.

I preordered one Ploopy trackpad back then, it finally arrived this February, and after used it for a few days I order a second one, and the second one also arrived yesterday.

This is a mini review of it, with comparison to Apple Magic Trackpad:

The texture/feeling is quite different, the Ploopy trackpad feels rough (as it’s 3d printed). I, personally, actually like this feeling.

The Ploopy trackpad does not have “click” at all (it cannot be clicked), and you always need to use tap-to-click. I always use tap-to-click with Apple’s or laptops’ trackpads anyways, so I don’t mind that. But if you don’t like tap-to-click, then this is likely a dealbreaker for you.

This might be related to the no click, or related to the rough texture, I haven’t figured out exactly why yet, but I noticed that with Ploopy trackpad, when I use tap-to-drag for a longer distance, I’m more likely to fail (the drag stops middle way). So far this is only a minor annoyance for me. I guess it would likely work easier if I use the stylus comes with it to do tap-and-drag (yes it comes with a stylus stowed in), but I need to retrain my muscle memory to use the stylus to do that 😅.

Sometimes, when I use two finger scrolling, it will mistake me as pinch to zoom and zoom the page instead. This is also only a minor annoyance for me so far.

The final one actually also applies to Apple’s trackpad, but it’s just more obvious on the Ploopy one as it has no click: When I use it with my linux server, I started to notice that it actually does not support tap-to-click out-of-the-box, even after I turned on that setting in KDE’s system settings. I didn’t noticed that issue with Apple’s trackpad previously because I mostly just use the linux box as a server and rarely use the GUI on it. This is also likely an X11 only issue (that it likely already works out-of-the-box with Wayland), but wayland broke on my linux server sometime last year and I didn’t dig into that yet. Anyways, following Debian wiki, I added this config file and it fixed the issue:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf 
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "Tapping" "on"
EndSection

Overall I’m happy with it (otherwise I won’t buy a second one). Now I am finally free of Apple’s trackpads and lightning cables.