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Comment by abacadaba | Hacker News Reader

the game changing part is that it's actually totally viable to do real work with without a mouse. never felt that way when using a laptop before.

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I've been an exclusive touchpad user for years already. This really isn't a big change - well, it could be if you move from a really crappy touchpad (and from my experience perceived crappiness is usually software's fault, although of course there are some bad apples in hardware too).

Having used the Macbook trackpad... I don't understand the hype. As a trackpad, it's brilliant. But so what? On a table, I'd much rather use a mouse. The weirdly inaccurate precision, odd acceleration, and clumsy movement makes the trackpad feel off. There's no acceleration sweetspot and there's no sensitivity sweetspot that I could find.. On my lap, I don't usually have enough space to use a trackpad over say a trackpoint.

It's a great solution, but it just doesn't solve any problem I have. I'd rather have a scroll wheel.

Having used a trackpad for years, I don't even use a mouse when one is available (outside of 'gaming') and use my trackpad 100% of the time. I also use my laptop for hours per week on planes / trains on my lap without any issues from the trackpad. For me, that's not something that ever felt comfortable to do with the trackpoint.. and trying to use a mouse on a train seems like it would be unpleasant.

I expect I'm not the only person in that situation and it's great if more effort goes into trying to improve the trackpad experience of linux on a laptop!

How do I do gestures on a mouse? Example: drag a file, 3 finger swipe to different desktop, drop file.

Done by holding a button that doesn't exist, but which you forget isn't there. Cos the driver is that good.

I prefer being able to scroll horizontally and vertically, zoom in/out and rotate on the spot. There's no question the multitouch model is more expressive, but we're all gimped by mice.

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