Twenty years ago I tried to use a touchpad, but I had a bad experience. My palms selected and moved directories and brought our production system down. Since then, the first thing I do on every new laptop is to disable the touchpad. Therefore, a touchpad is nothing but electronic waste for me.
Since that time, I have become addicted to the pointing stick keyboards. At present, this limits my options for laptops to Dell, Lenovo, and HP business class laptops.
Will you have configuration options for people like me? A keyboard with a pointing stick and/or the ability to forego a touchpad all together? I suppose I can try to use a finger trackball mouse. Any other suggestions?
As someone who was also ardently anti-touchpad for years, I’ve found that they’ve really come a very long way. I still prefer Lenovo’s little red button, but have found modern touchpads to be, dare I say, usable. YMMV, of course, but they may have cleared a threshold for you. Mostly because I’m seeing the same thing you are, that it’s really getting harder and harder to find options with pointing sticks…
I’ve definitely never met a trackpad on a Windows PC that I’ve enjoyed. I primarily use Mac and have actually gotten to the point where I don’t enjoy mice. But I agree with @Will_Cohen, they have come along way. My work laptop is a Thinkpad P53 and it’s mostly fine. I hope you’ll give them another shot!
Also consider that multi-touch gestures have come a long way as well. Macs are famous for their slick and smooth touchpad gesture workflow; moving in between windows and whatnot. I have not personally had a lot of usage time with Mac, but I’ve been missing those features on my Linux machine. Linux recently made some driver changes that should allow for better multi-touch gestures though, so I need to revisit that
I hope Framework’s touchpad is high quality and smooth!
@B_V Check out Fedora 34 or Arch Linux + Gnome. They both have Gnome 40, which defaults to wayland and supports the smoothest multi-touch gestures I’ve ever seen (Nearly comparable to a MacOS, and waaay smoother than Windows 10). The only caveat is that everything seems to be done with three finger touch gestures instead of four finger, so your muscle memory might need to be retrained.
