System 76 - please reposition touchpad on Gazelle Professional laptops

**Bill Tetzeli** · May 17th, 2015

I'm on my second Gazelle Professional laptop now (the first having suffered from a mishap too embarrassing to mention - let's just say you don't swat flies that land on your laptop). Unfortunately, it may also be my last. Because despite being excellent machines, the positioning of the touchpad - in a word - sucks.

The proper position for any touchpad is directly behind the spacebar, being either of equal or slightly smaller width than it. Otherwise you end up with what my experience has been - frequent unintended clicking, selecting, etc. while typing. The result is nervewracking. Because the touchpad is shifted slightly to the right of the space bar, commands have to be retyped, paragraphs rewritten, programs closed that weren't meant to be, etc. It is thoroughly crazy-making and it happens too often to relate. (Yes, I know you can disable the touchpad while typing in the settings manager, but if you pause for even a moment it's back to the same nonsense.)

This isn't rocket science. You put the touchpad directly behind the space bar to minimize this sort of thing. Period. I have a Toshiba Satellite, two Thinkpads and an Acer AspireOne netbook, all of which run Linux, all of which work very fine, thank you, and all of which have the touchpad where it's supposed to be. Coincidentally they don't drive me crazy when typing. This kind of hair-tearing experience is completely unnecessary. I like to support good companies that make good products, especially if it helps make Linux a paying proposition. But I can get it done just as easily on a used laptop bought for a third of the price on eBay. If System 76 doesn't fix this completely unnecessary problem, that's exactly where I'll take my future business.

**Skaperen** · May 19th, 2015

get a USB mouse (i got this wireless one for real 3-button usage) and use Fn+F1 to turn off the touchpad (as documented here)

**Bill Tetzeli** · May 22nd, 2015

I have one, but sometimes I have to travel with it and a mouse isn't practical. Ditto if I want to use it while in bed or on the sofa.

It's totally incomprehensible to me why this is. It's one of those, "Everyone else manages to do it, why can't you?" things. Like Lenovo putting the Fn key on the bottom left corner instead of the CTRL key. Hare-brained stuff like that that makes you scratch your head and wonder.

Simply put, you don't put a touch pad where the palms rest. Ever. It's D-U-M-B.

**Skaperen** · May 23rd, 2015

to me the whole concept of a touchpad seems all wrong but i do turn mine off (i have a kudu pro and it is just below the space bar and about an inch to the right),

i don't understand what you meant by "behind the spacebar" ... mine is below.

i looked at the images on the web site and both Gazelle and Kudu look like what i have ... do you see the issue in their rotating images?
https://system76.com/laptops/gazelle
https://system76.com/laptops/kudu

**Bill Tetzeli** · May 23rd, 2015

I'm not sure what issue you're talking about with the rotating images - the one I'm pointing out or another one? As for behind/below, I guess that depends on your perspective. What I'm trying to say is that the edges of the touchpad shouldn't extend significantly to the right or left of the spacebar, because that determines where the palms rest during typing. Position the touchpad where the palms rest, like System 76 does, and you invite accidental clicks and all the hair-tearing loss of productivity that comes with it. The Satellite I'm typing on has a touch pad that extends maybe a quarter inch to either side of the space bar. That's fine. I've gone days with the touchpad turned on after I've put it back on my desk from taking it somewhere else and not even known it was on. Not so with the Gazelle. The touchpad extends at least a full inch to the right of the space bar. That inevitably is going to cause problems.

Again, there's no good reason for this. I can only believe the reason it was done was for aesthetics, because someone thought it just looked "wrong" to have the touchpad any farther to the left than it already was. I'd rather have it look wrong than work wrong, and sadly, that's what's ended up happening. I've never seen any other laptop maker design their product this way. For a good reason, obviously.

**Skaperen** · May 30th, 2015

i see what you mean now. it's probably (just guessing) an issue of touchpad size in the components market forcing them to use a big one.

**Skaperen** · May 31st, 2015

what i mean by rotating images is on the individual product pages ...

https://system76.com/laptops/gazelle
https://system76.com/laptops/kudu

scroll down to the 3rd picture ... the 2nd picture of the laptop ... the laptop is rotating around so you can see it all around. at least it rotates for me (firefox on ubuntu on a kudu pro).

**tatere2** · August 4th, 2015

This is so absolutely right. I have the Kudu and it has this exact problem. It's not just that it makes me crazy - unintended pasting and clicking is dangerous. "Buy a mouse" is not a helpful response, either. Of course using a mouse and turning off the keypad avoids the problem, but if that was suitable we would have done it. A mouse takes real estate, and it's also differently stressful - for me much more so, that probably varies for each person.

The perhaps good news is that their new Serval seems to be better, somewhat, maybe. The bad news is that System76 support seems to be invested in refusing to believe that this is a problem. One can only hope that their product design and/or purchasing department can see what they won't.

**Geoffrey_Arndt** · August 8th, 2015

While this is not a perfect solution, here are two alternatives:

1). Investigate and learn all available system and program hot keys. Key combos (ctrl+x, ctrl+v and dozens of others) are by far the fastest and most reliable way to navigate menus and desktop features. Often, you can set up your own custom key-bindings (depending on the program - - for example, Freeplane Mindmapping app supports many custom keys). The best (by far) word processing program I've ever used was WordPerfect 5.1 . . . no mouse, no trackpad . . . just 3 or 4 dozen hot-key combos that made producing a complex document a real joy. Course, we didn't do much graphics-drawing then either. That brings me to the second solution:

2). Consider using a trackball (or perhaps a wacom tablet). A trackball can be used many places where a mouse can't . . . ditto the wacom.

Meanwhile, turning the trackpad off/on is so simple in System76 laptops, if I have to do a bunch of typing, I opt for that, even though unintended input via trackpad is not a big issue (the way I type) on my Galago Ultra Pro.

**mc4man** · August 20th, 2015

I don't think the layout is up to Sys76 other than which Clevo model they choose to use.
And from a recent purchase from Sys76 here, ( & repacked for return within 30 min.), I'm not too convinced they really test the model(s) they choose to use all that much.