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Kistaro Windrider, Reptillian Situation Assessor

Unfortunately, I Really Am That Nerdy

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The "We are smarter than everybody else" school of hardware design
headwall, frustration
I've been having increasing problems with my netbook vs. creative variations on Linux I'd like to try. At this point, it's sort of my regularly-mindwiped scratch computer. It's like a ten-inch avatar of instant messaging and IRC, and I haven't yet found an OS that actually does that well, for several varieties of reasons.

Windows builds are kind of clumsy for the task, really. There're several varieties of Linux that would almost work better, but "almost" and "would" are not quite the same...

HP thought it was a clever idea to use a touchpad that has no actual buttons. Instead, the entire thing clicks, and if you were touching the "right mouse button" painted onto it at the time, it was a right-click. This is not in hardware and requires driver support.

It seems like I can either have right-click working, or basically any of the other features of a useful touchpad working, but not both. No scroll margin or two-finger scroll, no inertia, no acceleration, but at least it can right-click.

A netbook has limited space, so trying to save space by omitting physical buttons is semi-reasonable. But why not do what Acer did for my Aspire One and just stick them to the side? There's plenty of space there!

I'd like to try one of the various builds of Chromium. But, wi-fi issues aside, they can't seem to keep the gsynaptic driver package reliably loaded, and that interferes pretty badly with usability.

I've migrated to DreamWidth. The original post is at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/479712.html. View comment count unavailable comments at http://kistaro.dreamwidth.org/479712.html#comments; go ahead and use OpenID to post your own, or you can comment here.