I recently acquired one thinking it was going to be a cool and useful feature, and the only time I think to use it is when I brush away a loose cat hair and my cursor goes all over the place. And the tablet mode, I think I used it once as a novelty.
Never
If anything, it can be annoying when you go to clean something on the screen
I think I just self-reported my age…
Me: so rarely that I keep forgetting it’s a touch screen
My wife and daughter: constantly, so my screen is full of their fingerprints
Never. I didn’t realise it had a touch screen when I got it, i disabled it, and I don’t miss it.
Wait you can disable that shit?
It appears in Gnome and Xfce as a touchpad, turn it off in settings.
I have kde, so I disabled it in xorg config
Ah, now I get it why there are both touchpad and mouse even though no mouse connected! Thanks!
I use one for sound recording, as tapping controls on a screen makes far less noise than a keyboard or mouse of any make or model.
Mine is a two-in-one where the keyboard can fold fully backwards and it puts the laptop in “tablet mode.” I use it constantly for reading comic books, as rotating to a portrait frame and swiping through pages is much easier than scrolling/zooming on each page with mouse and keyboard.
I also occasionally use it for doodling when I’m traveling, but I’ve got a nicer setup for that on my desktop. So that’s a corner case.
Those laptops with the reversible screen and the Surface are convenient for genuinely using the touch screen on the go to play simple time killing games while waiting in public without messing with the peripherals
The ones that are just normal laptops with built in keyboards and a folding touchscreen only ever got touched when someone was demonstrating that it was a touchscreen
ITT: people hating on touchscreens
Also ITT: people pointing out really good reasons to have a touch screen.
the good reasons: none
Pretty much never. Even if my hands are dry and clean, I get annoying marks on the screen.
Only to answer teams calls because I can hit the notification with my pinkie rather then moving my hand to the mouse.
all the time. sucks to go back.
From the first moment I used a touchscreen laptop, every laptop I have encountered is a touchscreen to my unconcious mind… Doesn’t matter how old, without thinking I just touch that screen.
I had a Surface Pro all through college, and used it for note taking in all my classes (pen on screen), which was fantastic. Haven’t really used the touchscreen function since though, and it’s been quite a few years.
same here. I also do some drawing stuff on krita, so the pen comes in handy for that.
Same here. Couldn’t imagine typing math formulas without the pen on screen. And math was part of close to all the courses in one form or another.
I don’t use it consciously. But I do notice when I’m using a laptop without touchscreen - so I probably use it more than I think.
I mostly use it in tent mode with keyboard and mouse attached tho.I don’t have one, but when I was at uni one of the lecturers had this dinky old-looking laptop that apparently had a touchscreen, and he would project the screen and draw on it during lectures, which worked really well to illustrate what he was talking about. Had some software to just draw on top of what he was presenting, to be clear.
I bought a cheap 8" tablet on eBay many years ago, and really liked using it for college. Then when my regular laptop broke and I had some money, I went for one of those 13" Yoga thinkpads, thinking it would replace both the tablet and the aging laptop.
In the 7 or so years since I bought it, I can count the number of years that I used it on two hands. I’ve used the shitty old 2013 dell tablet more than the touch screen / pen input on the laptop. It mostly lives in a docking station on my desk, or gets used as a regular laptop. It’s just too big to be used as a tablet, period. Cool concept, wasn’t worth the extra money for me.
Sometimes, mostly for a quick volume or pause/play press.
Being able to fold it right round can be useful as it uses less space when you are just playing a video or something. (Less chance of damaging it while cooking too!)
I got a fancy one with a pen, but found that trains are really not as smooth as I thought so the plan of learning to draw on the train never happened.
Edit: the pen support has come in useful for electronically signing things multiple times!
