I've never gotten them to work well on laptops running Linux. I have limited patience for fiddling around with drivers, releases, different laptops, so perhaps I just haven't spent enough hours trying to get them to work; in the end, I've always given up and just thrown a small mouse in my bag.
For me, the palm rejection has never worked as well as it does on Macs and the scrolling and multi-touch gestures are so pathetic under Linux on a laptop that its better to just disable the touchpad and stick with a mouse.
Even the glassy smooth feel of the Mac touchpad is superior to other laptops and the new haptic touchpad on the newer macs makes clicking on any part of the touchpad wonderful.
I do have a question for HN: with enough practice, does a keyboard with the pointing stick ever feel adequate? I've never seemed to get the hang of it in the numerous times I've had to use them (each time for only a few minutes).
