Hello System76. I don't know if this is the appropriate place to post suggestions, but I couldn't find any indications as to where to communicate them. If it's not, would someone please provide me with a link where I can send them?

In almost 4 years I've bought two S76 laptops. The first was a PanP6 in November 2009 and just this September, I upgraded to a Gazelle Pro. Overall I've been quite happy with these machines. They run smooth and silent and perform exaclty the way I want.

That being said, a couple of things nagged me with the PanP6, that I saw repeated with the Gazelle (some have actually become worse). I hope you can get some insight and maybe work toward "fixing" these by the time I buy my next one in say... 3 or 4 years? With no further ado, my complains.

1) The touchpad. It's either too large or badly positioned. I'm a touch typist, when working on a qwerty keyboard, my index fingers should ideally be positioned respectively above the f and j keys, with my wrist relaxed for some comfortable typing. You'll notice that with the described positioning, the space bar is located at equal distace right between both hands. Unfortunately, with my S76 laptops it's not the case with the touchpad which finds itself shifted to the right, slightly under my right hand, just enough for those annoying involuntary cursor movements when typing, especially when I'm reaching for keys on the top rows with my right hand. This is a problem I had sometimes with the Pangolin, but the Gazelle with its larger touchpad takes it to whole other level. To circumvent this I have to either tilt my right wrist slightly in a somewhat unatural position, or I have to disable the touchpad altogether (for some reason the option to ignore movements while typing has never worked for me, in any of the two laptops).

2) The function keys position: Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why the sleep key is positioned between two sound related keys. A much better arrangement in my opinion would be, (a) to make it easy to find the most commonly used functions (e.g. sound all the way to the left and sleep all the way to the right) and, (b) minimize the potential of small annoyances that may result from pressing keys with somewhat consequential side effects (sleep, prt scr). A proposal of such arrangement if I may:

Mute | Vol- | Vol+ | touchpad | Bright- | Bright+ | network | camera | lcd | display output | f11 | sleep (on f12)

With this arrangement the most commonly used keys (sound and touchpad) are isolated from the sleep key, which is still easy to find as it's the last key.

3) Function keys color: Under half decent light it's hard to see what the keys are. In slightly darker surroundings (coffee shops, living rooms with some ambient lighting), it's even harder. May I propose to change these into something like red, orange, or even light green?

That's it, other than that, I've had very little to complain about from both of these machines. They've been a solid investment.

Thanks.