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Comment by AaronFriel | Hacker News Reader

> I'm serious. Whoever the genius was that decided that swipes on a laptop trackpad should behave the same way as on a tablet (in this case, switching applications) should be shot, and the corpse fired.

Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture. That was probably added by Synaptic, or the OEM of your laptop, and you should disable the gesture and probably let the OEM know that including that gesture was insane.

The rest of your complaints are, well, I think they're overstated, but I can't argue with how using the OS "feels" to someone. If you think it feels poorly done, me telling you your feelings are wrong is not going to get us anywhere. But at least factually, you should know that some of your assertions might be rooted in what OEMs have done to add crap to Windows 8.

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Tested this on vanilla Win8. Swiping from "beyond" the right edge of the trackpad to ~1cm left from the right edge opens the Charms menu (same thing as Win+C shortcut or doing the same gesture on the touchscreen). Similar results (app switching) happen when swiping from the left edge.

This is a built-in Win8 feature, not a custom driver feature. The gesture recognition is quite decent though, so I've never had these gestures activate accidentally.

It sounded like the author was referring to a (very real) feature of Synaptic trackpads that performs app switching via the trackpad.

I just installed Win 8.1 on my 2006 Dell e1505 laptop, and while it performs admirably (1gb of RAM!) I was surprised to find that the trackpad gestures were not in fact baked in.

Well you must agreed we should credit Microsoft on at least one thing...the third party driver install process from Windows Update is so smooth even Scence_Cast2 wasn't aware it happened.

>>Yes, they should be. Then, you should uninstall the custom trackpad driver that does that, because that's not a built-in gesture.

How many people are going to be able to: 1)diagnose the problem(the driver) 2) figure out they need a new driver 3) find a driver for the bundled hardware that will work the way they want(assuming it exists) 4) uninstall the bundled driver 5) install the new one

If something isn't easily fixable for 99% of computer users its broken because they don't even know where to start.

The same thing is wrong with the backup solutions microsoft has. They are all either 1) are too heavy weight and brittle or 2) do nothing useful. People aren't going to take the time to go install third party full system backup software when it isn't clear it will even work for them and they don't know how it will work when they need to recover something. It is just another thing they have to manage on their computer.

Compare that to Time Machine. It usually just works, and when it doesn't it is better than nothing. Plus people understand exactly how it works. Lost something? Go Star Wars! Simple and effective.

I almost completely agree, but no one seems amenable to the idea that Microsoft should be able to forbid vendors from customization of the computers they sell; some even think it would renew DOJ scrutiny.

As it is, the best way for users to buy a device with a Microsoft OS is probably the Microsoft Store, because they forbid those same customizations.

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