GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 28, 2024 7:54 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958)
In reply to: GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center by larkey
Parent article: GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

I think most non-emacs nerds probably use the mouse most of the times.

And emacs nerds use emacs :D

I have no data but I think that the people who mostly use keyboard and yet don't mostly use shells aren't that many.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 28, 2024 11:47 UTC (Thu) by larkey (guest, #104463) [Link] (5 responses)

Oh, definitely, most people don't use the keyboard exclusively – but those people usually use a laptop with a touch pad for which GNOME is very well-suited. I totally admit that GNOME has depriorised mouse input they have improved on all the other fronts that

It's just the "mouse" as a physical pointing device that's getting less and less common. So GNOME is focusing on the biggest chunk of consumers (touchpad) + the power users (keyboard) and doesn't try to cater to completely everyone, by excluding the combination that's slowly dieing (keyboard+mouse).

I think that's a fair decision because it's hard to build something that everyone will enjoy.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 1:33 UTC (Fri) by Baughn (subscriber, #124425) [Link] (4 responses)

Do people actually use the touchpad on non-macs?

I can’t complain about mine, but well, I use a mac. Every time I bring it along to someone who doesn’t, they look at me funny for not hacking bright a mouse with me.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 1:54 UTC (Fri) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118) [Link] (1 responses)

Of course, why not? I've been using Trackpoint for decades, but in recent years my touchpad sees more usage. Two-finger scrolling, three-finger workplace and app switch are very comfortable.

My wife still uses Trackpoint, but it's getting harder for her. The scrollbars are getting smaller or disappear completely in some designs. And she insists on clicking on them. Not even using mouse wheel emulation (middle button + Trackpoint) :(

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 14:35 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I use an ergonomic keyboard and trackball, I find an ordinary keyboard and laptop trackpad very unpleasant to use.

The disappearance of things like scroll bars and obvious ways to scroll is a real pain. And at work with gmail, I often have to export images in email because I can't find anyway of scrolling at all!

Cheers,
Wol

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 15:24 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

There was a long stretch where Apple was shipping top-of-the-line trackpads and drivers (from Synaptics I think) and most other vendors were shipping lower spec trackpads with worse drivers (eg using PS/2 mouse emulation) but I think most higher-end laptops are shipping trackpads and drivers (Precision Touchpad?) that are equivalent to what Apple uses. My Dell Precision work laptop touchpad seems to work as well as the MacBook Pro it replaced.

GNOME 46 puts Flatpaks front and center

Posted Mar 29, 2024 22:53 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

I can see why many people would have a history of bad touchpad experiences.

At one time I had a Macbook and a netbook, with vastly different sizes and configurations of touchpad. The Macbook's factory touchpad configuration was awesome if the touchpad is the size of a postage stamp, and the netbook's factory touchpad configuration was awesome if the touchpad is larger than a human hand. Both of these would have been intolerable without the Synaptics configuration tools to change the defaults.

For legacy reasons, the netbook default configuration carved up the touchpad into separate scrolling and clicking regions (even though the touchpad had dedicated buttons!), so there was no room left on the pad for moving the cursor around. Touching the device almost anywhere caused unintentional input. Moving the mouse across the screen to a small target without randomly clicking or scrolling something nearby was like a game of Operation--if the game of Operation deleted something important at random whenever you lost the game.

At the time, I was accustomed to the PC convention for larger (but not as large as Macbook) touchpads, so I wanted all the familiar separate scroll and click areas. The Macbook's huge configurable touchpad could easily accommodate all of them, as well as the missing buttons, and still have plenty of space left over for high-resolution, high-speed pointer movement, without using any multi-finger gestures.

Eventually I grew out of scrolling regions in favor of multi-finger gestures, and netbook manufacturers stopped supplying separate buttons, so now every touchpad gets the same configuration. I no longer know what the defaults are. Judging from what is printed on the touchpads these days (is that...a numeric keypad?), I'm certain I prefer ignorance.

These days I mostly use a mouse for CAD, but that's because I usually use a desktop workstation for CAD, and the mouse is still the norm on that hardware configuration. I don't do enough CAD to justify one of the more exotic input devices.