Touchpads in the Center

I’ve noticed lately that my wrist has been getting stiffer. I’ve been using my personal laptop more in the past month, which has a touchpad not in the center. This thing is ever so slightly pushed left. When I bought it, I wasn’t even thinking about how this could affect its ergonomics, but it really does. Take for instance my work laptop—I’ve been using that thing for years at this point in the exact same position as I do my personal laptop. No wrist issues.

Maybe I need to try Hyprland so that I leave the keyboard far less often. I don’t know if that is a fix though… but… I don’t know if I don’t try. The cause is really the game I play. There is a lot of redundant moves to install industry jobs and keep the data flowing. Select job, move up and click start, move down click job, move up click start—30 times, 2 times a day. If I could only select 10 and install them, I’d have 3 moves. So, Hyprland won’t help me inside EVE, which is the main driver.

What is it about my work laptop and workflow that doesn’t make my wrists get stiff? I do a good bit of touchpad movement, but the touchpad is huge, in the center, and extremely well built. It doesn’t matter if my hands are a touch sweaty (which they generally are, unfortunately), unlike my home laptop. The home laptop requires that I use a little bit of force to click it, and then sometimes it doesn’t even register the click… so I have to click again… causing repeated actions… AGAIN. I’m really beginning to hate this laptop.

The laptop’s power is perfect for me though. It’s got a modern GPU—even though it’s bottom of the line, it’s still enough for me. I play Minecraft… and EVE… and some circa 2017 video games. Maybe some Cyberpunk in the near future. This card does actually handle it on like medium presets with no raytracing. Decent stuff. It was cheap, and apparently it has 2 M.2 slots, so I will be adding the second drive when I get motivated to pull it out of my old desktop.

With all this said, I think I’ve been aware of this issue far longer than just recently. I am just now putting a face on it. The reason I say I’ve noticed it is because I’m reluctant to purchase a laptop that I can’t feel first. Like a System76 device, for instance. Some of the models look like they have a nice touchpad, but then others look like they have buttons below the touchpad… what is it, 2013 or something? We use gestures and multitouch options now for different mouse presses—please make touchpads that compete with the MacBook. That should be the gold standard.

Now, I don’t NEED a new laptop, but I would like to have a non-gaming laptop—one that has a ton of battery life. Something like the System76 Pangolin or even something like my Dell Precision from work. I just want more than an hour on low power settings.

I wish System76 had a brick and mortar store near me or sold at Micro Center.