Buttonless trackpads

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I'm putting this in off topic because it's more of a rant thread than a request for help/advice. Before telling me to just buy a mouse, I know the option exists, but I actively prefer trackpads over mice, even for gaming. (I know that's a very unpopular opinion here.) To use a mouse, I have to find a large, level, and flat surface, but I can use my laptop's trackpad anywhere I can place down the laptop. This means I don't have to clear off as much desk space, and I don't even have to stay at the desk. Additionally, I barely have to move my hand to get from the keyboard to the trackpad (and can sometimes even keep my fingers on home row while moving just my thumb), but I have to move my hand across much of the width of the keyboard + the buffer space between the laptop and the mouse in order to switch between the keyboard and mouse. Plus, I find that I can change the speed and direction of just my finger faster than I can change the speed and direction of a large portion of my arm + a mouse, so I find trackpads faster. Plus, a mouse is an additional thing to carry and keep track of which for obvious reasons can't really be built into the laptop, while the trackpad is integrated into the laptop and doesn't have to be carried separately. I already have a mouse, but I still prefer the trackpad.

 

I'll start with what is no longer an issue. Older buttonless trackpads had issues where the cursor would drift a bit as you tried to click it because it's impossible to keep your finger perfectly still. That's no longer a problem. Additionally, tap and drag used to be a nightmare, and while it isn't quite as nice as having click buttons, it's now no longer a bad experience.

 

The problem that remains is reliably differentiating between left, middle and right click. On a trackpad with buttons, you can feel the difference between the buttons, and there is no ambiguity about which button is pressed. My buttonless trackpad offers two methods, which libinput calls button-areas and clickfinger. button-areas divides the bottom of the trackpad into areas for left, middle, and right click and interprets a click anywhere else as a left click by default. I get what it's trying to do, but on a flat surface there is no way to find the areas by feeling, and it's easy to end up on a border area (because there's no markings on the trackpad) and click the wrong area, so I basically have to look at the trackpad and carefully position my finger exactly in the middle of the area to make it work properly. Another issue is that if I still have a finger on the regular area from moving a cursor, it will always register a left click, probably because it can't tell which finger is really applying the pressure so it just assumes a left click to be safe or something. That's probably a solvable issue, but it's still an issue with my unit. clickfinger is the way most people use their trackpads, and it's the way I use it too because button-areas was just too annoying, where a click anywhere with one finger produces a left click, a click with two fingers makes a right click, and a click with 3 fingers makes a middle click. This works, but still occasionally produces the wrong kind of click if one of my fingers "lands" after the trackpad gets pressed. The only way I can think of to solve this issue is to introduce a delay after the click to wait for more fingers, and I think that delay will end up being more annoying than the occasional clicks with the wrong button. Right now, I get around this issue in productivity work by waiting until I'm sure that all of my fingers have landed before doing a right or middle click. While this is not quite as nice as being able to just press a button, it works. The problem is that in gaming, I often need to be able to perform left and right clicks quickly, sometimes while moving the cursor, and neither solution seems to be able to do that: button-areas because it requires verifying my finger position and not moving the cursor (otherwise I always get a left click), and clickfinger because it requires stopping to place my fingers first, which still takes some time and requires me to stop moving my fingers because they'll be interpreted as scrolling rather than cursor movement. So unless I can get used to using keys on my keyboard instead of clicking, my trackpad is useless for gaming and I'll have to use a mouse.

 

I'm aware of the rumors that Apple trackpads are better, which often come up whenever someone rants about trackpads. I've used Apple trackpads when helping people do things on their macbooks, and IMO they don't address the main issue I have with buttonless trackpads on PCs. The one advantage they still seem to have is being able to require equal force across the entire trackpad rather than a little force at the bottom, a ton of force in the middle, and being unclickable at the top. However, that never really bothered me, and the solution comes at the expense of having proper tactile feedback. (Sorry, but the vibrations, while better than absolutely nothing, just aren't the same.) Plus, I would have to pay too much money for hardware with questionable reliability that I can't fix or upgrade myself with shitty GNU/Linux compatibility (crappy battery life and many things not working or requiring tons of fucking around), and would have to deal with not having physical Home, End, Page Up, Page Down, Delete, and Menu keys.

 

This is not a huge deal, as my trackpad is still useful for productivity and I can tolerate gaming with a mouse. I just felt like I had to rant about this somewhere. The thing that I really don't get is that it probably took a bunch of engineering effort to fix the drift while clicking and tap to drag issues that wouldn't have been problems at all on a trackpad with buttons, and I don't understand why anyone would go through all the effort to produce something that is still inherently inferior when they already had something better that probably took less effort to design. Could all those millions of dollars of engineering effort and lower customer satisfaction really be worth the $0.0001/unit saved by not having buttons? They could probably save much more money with much less effort by not having the Kensington lock slot and built-in speakers, and almost nobody would care.

 

TLDR: They don't suck anymore, but they're still a downgrade from trackpads with buttons and I'm not sure their remaining issues are even fixable. They're still useful for productivity work, but I may have to switch to a mouse for gaming now.