I recall there's some sort of driver called synaptic that makes touchpads work, but the only reason you even need to think about it is because hardware manufacturers don't make drivers for linux, and that's a large source of the problems.

The linux evangelists can say that's not linux's fault, but it is linux's problem, and so far the solutions are incomplete.

I remember when Windows 95 came out and my dad explained to me that microsoft had made the system so successful by working with manufacturers to build a database of drivers for every conceivable piece of hardware, so the system would work on almost any machine.

Prior to that I remember having to know what brand of soundcard I had so I could manually configure it within each individual game I wanted to play using a command line based tool. I had to remember Creative Sound Blaster and hunt it down in the menus. Linux doesn't have that, in fact there's still a lot of messing about with command line based tools.