Gestures on Laptops and Deep Thoughts
You know me. I like to switch my environment up a bit from time to time. Okay. Once a week. Though admittedly, it hasn’t been that bad lately. I use Gnome and Qtile, mostly Qtile, and that’s it. I do have Plasma on my laptop, and while using it, I found that gestures may be the best thing ever. The idea of using a swipe to switch back and forth to different workspaces, or back and forth in the browser, or up to show an app switcher, all makes Linux feel like it finally arrived in the future.
I know. Gestures have been around for years, Matt; where the hell have you been? Well, I’ve been using window managers. And we don’t do all those fiddly things with the mouse, you normies do. We use keyboards, like real hack3rs! Whatever that means.
But seriously, I haven’t used a laptop with gestures before, at least not full-time. Now that I have my laptop fixed, I’ve been doing some actual work on there, and it has been a true discovery for me.
The thing is, I love window managers. And every time I go back to a desktop environment, I only last so long before I go crawling back, begging to return to the land of workspaces and picom. And, if we’re being honest, fancy gestures are unlikely to get that to change. But I decided to try anyway. I like trying things. I don’t know if the magic will transfer over from the laptop to the desktop or not, but I’ve ordered a trackpad, and I’m going to give it a try.
On the laptop, it really works well because it’s one screen. So workspaces, that work like desktop environment workspaces at least, make a ton of sense with gestures. On a desktop with four monitors, I’m not sure that it will work as well or make as much sense. As I’ve talked about before, I tend not to use workspaces as much when I’m trolling around desktop environment land. I just pile windows willy-nilly and bitch about how unorganized everything is. We’ll see if a trackpad actually changes that, or if I will go back to my bad habits.
This all has made me think about the true differences in the way I work on my desktop versus the way I work on my laptop. It’s entirely different, despite being the same operating system. For one, I type slower on my laptop. I’ve gotten so used to the Dactyl Manuform, it’s almost painful to go back to a traditional keyboard. On the other hand, I don’t tend to do as much lollygagging on my laptop. With four screens on my desktop, it is easy to have one of them filled with whatever unproductive nonsense has grabbed my attention. It’s not even in the way, since I have three others. Multitasking at its finest, I guess.
On my desktop, I also find myself using the keyboard more for shortcuts and moving around, while on the laptop, I use the mouse a ton more. There’s something about that smaller screen that makes me more of a traditional computer user than when I’m sitting at my big rig.
I find this schism in workflow very interesting because I know that most users of computers out there also fall on one side or the other. Either you’re a desktop fanboy or you’re a laptop girlie. I’m sure there are those like me who straddle the line between both, but most people only have one computer (shocker, I know), so they have to choose. I’m guessing here, but laptops are probably the big winner due to cheapness and portability. Most people don’t want the bulk or expense of a desktop computer these days. Not in the age of a computer in your pocket.
That also makes me think that the “choice” of a laptop or a desktop workflow has nothing to do with the interesting division in how they differ, but instead has mostly to do with people just like laptops more because of price, portability, and all that rot. It’d be interesting to know, of those who actually know and have used both setups, which they prefer and why. Is it just the portability, or is there something, as I seem to sense, that draws you to one or the other? The differences that divide these two choices are either very important or not important at all, and I wonder where that slider sits.
What an odd little blog post. Definitely went in a direction that I didn’t expect it to go. If you have thoughts on the laptop/desktop divide, please let me know in the comments. If you want to get my blog posts a week early, you can support me on Patreon.