I still use a mouse with my laptops. The button-less track pads are junk. Most programs are not optimized for touchscreen use and I don’t want fingerprints all over my screen anyways. The Thinkpad trackpoints are OK, but they are not usable in CAD software that needs 3 buttons and a scroll wheel to navigate.
FreeCAD has a navigation method specifically for trackpads
The Apple trackpad has remained in my opinion the best one ever developed and continues to improve generation to generation. They lost the script on keyboards for a hot minute there, and their mice have always been horrible to the point of deliberate non-functionality, but those trackpads are amazing. Their external trackpad has also come a long way in the past few years.
The mouse was never the best tool for a lot of computing jobs, it was just what caught on.
I still primarily use my computers as a desktop, and I don’t like it when software requires me to reach over to my pointing device. When it does, the majority of the time I reach for a trackball which is far more comfortable.
After dabbling with tiling windows managers in Linux some years ago, I came to realize that pointing devices are often the slow way to do things.
The main thing I want a pointing device for these days is for scrolling through documents and web pages, and the vast majority of mice are just bad at that. Precision scrolling is only available on a handful of mice, and its niche enough that consistent software implementation is just not a thing.
I’ll still keep a mouse on hand for playing the occasional video game that works better with one, but that’s not really how I like to play games usually.
Back in something like 2003 the computer I had at work had a trackball instead of a mouse. I hated it, until I finally replaced it with mouse and found myself really missing my trackball. Still use them 20+ years later.
My wife still only uses Logitech track ball mice on her desktop. On the rare occasion I need to use her oc for something, it’s always an interesting time haha. Only takes about 10 seconds to be ‘calibrared’ to it now.
I’m also using a trackball, it was Logitech ones and now a Sanwa Gravi
I started with Logitech, now I use Elecom.
I’ve been on a Penny & Giles for over 10 years. Couldn’t compute without it.
nice one :)
Been using the Kensington Expert Wireless a couple of years now.
Sir, this is Lemmy.
“We’ve forgotten how to use computers - The hex keypad is sorely missed”
Remember (if you can) the classic drag-and-drop: You’d mouse over to a file or a folder, click to slide the icon to the trash, then release to drop it in.
Did anyone everr do that though ?
