Man, I can’t believe it’s 2016 and Windows and Linux have still not figured out a laptop touchpad. As much as OS X annoys me sometimes, every time I go from the MBP touchpad to a Windows or Linux machine, I just want to shoot myself. I go from being a 60 wpm typist, having some skills, to a complete five-thumbed single finger dork.
It’s like it’s designed to make me feel like my own grampa.
Windows, which I don’t mind ordinarily when using a mouse (thank you iTap Mobile RDP, and fuck you MS for buying and killing it – I’ll be sad when it stops working), becomes completely unusable with a Dell or HP touchpad. I could no more select a bunch of files and drag them someplace else than do a pommel horse routine.
And Linux has that experience, pardon me, “UX”, plus Gnome window borders that are literally one pixel wide. The guy who installed it says that’s a feature. I want to check back with him in 20 years. And then kick him in the shin.
Don’t even get me started on the crappy focus-follows-mouse, and how that interacts badly with the crappy touchpad, while issuing commands to irreplaceable flight hardware. I don’t think I’ve every finished a complicated command in the same terminal window it started in. It’s a PFR waiting to happen.
At least on Linux I can usually ssh and do everything from iTerm on the command-line on a MacBook Pro with a working touchpad, without having to figure out this week’s recipe for installing cygwin on Windows.