You can scroll by holding down the middle trackpad button with your thumb and pushing the trackpoint in one direction or the other. You can even scroll horizontally this way. This is the main reason for the complaint about the missing middle button.
Why would anybody use a laptop keyboard and no mouse for serious development work? It's always an ergonomic nightmare.
Of course when travelling light you might choose to leave extra stuff at home. But how many of us need to travel light to a new location before starting their daily work?
The keyboard is missing an Insert key. But they're advertising an "FHD" screen as though that's a selling feature? That's only 1920x1080 - my Sony Vaio Z laptop from 2010 has the same resolution. People doing any kind of user-facing frontend dev-work pretty-much need a screen capable of 2x/200%/192dpi (i.e. 4K) at least. ...that's a deal-killer for me, as is the lack of a true middle-button on the touchpad. I'll be s…
1920x1080 sounds great to me. I used to have it on an older X1 and battery life was great.
When I got my X1 gen 7 with 4K battery life has become much worse. I have not noticed that I have become a better programmer because the fonts look smoother.
Looking at the keyboard layout makes me wonder. How many devs here actually use the right shift key and/or the right modifier keys? I've been programming for 20 years (15 or so using emacs) and I exclusively use the left shift and left modifiers. I probably have never used the (physically) right shift/modifier keys on the keyboard I'm currently typing on that I've had for 2 years. I loathe the four left modifier key…
Proper touch typing dictates that you should not use the same hand to both type the modifier key and the modified key. So a symmetrical setup is necessary in that case.
I bought a new System 76 machine about this time last year, and splurged (by my standards) on 64GB of RAM. BEST. DECISION. EVAAAR. as far as I'm concerned. For probably the first time in my life, I feel like I can do basically whatever I want and not have to worry about RAM. Have 8 Firefox windows with 200 tabs open, 3 or 4 Eclipse instances, and a few server apps running, and want to launch a bunch of VM's with Vagr…
Who would be able to productively use 200 open browser tabs? Seems like a strange argument to waste even more resources on a more and more ruined planet.
Sometimes if I'm buying some stuff from Amazon I'll do a ton of research on each one, looking for alternatives, specs, discussions, reviews, etc. Each search can sometimes go up to 40-50 tabs, especially if I'm looking for a specific set of attributes in a product and I just can't find the perfect match. I'll do the searches in parallel and switch between them, so I'll keep everything open since closing and re-opening 50 tabs whenever I want to revisit a session is tedious. Getting to 200 tabs is pretty normal in these situations.
The presence of the buttons doesn't matter much does it? Assuming a tap works as mouse click. Maybe they're there for nipple users - it has one. Use fingers on the nipple and thumb on the button. So to speak.
The third button is usually for scrolling.
Maybe pressing both together registers as a the third button?