this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2024
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... and then everybody joined me in thinking that this would be a good place to stop and actively avoided the continued attempts to sell us on new features that further complicate things.
I don't personally go down the wireless mouse route -- in fact, in general, I'd rather not use wireless and especially Bluetooth devices, due to reliability, latency, security, needing-to-worry-about-battery-charge, and privacy (due to broadcasting a unique ID that any nearby cell phone will relay the position of to Google, Apple, or similar). But I'd say that aside from that, most of those are advantageous, and a lot of people out there don't care (or don't know about) wireless drawbacks, so for them, even those are a win.
The main complexity item I can think of is the buttons. Maybe back in the day, few set up Mouse Button #5 to be "drag window" in their window manager, as I did, so I could drag windows anywhere rather than on their titlebar. However, the browser "back" and "forward" functionality that I believe is the default in all desktop environments these days seems pretty easily-approachable.
Yeah it is mostly the extra buttons that annoy me personally, I don't really know why. I have better ways of doing the things you mention but I'm sure there could theoretically be some use for them. I've played games where they might've been useful, but it seems like no software is designed to rely on them and I always found their placement made it too easy to hit them by accident. Maybe my hands are the wrong shape or something.
I haven't hit that, but one thing that might help if you don't like that -- you might be able to set it up such that they only operate in your environment when chorded -- like, when you hit multiple buttons at the same time. Like, only have "left click plus back" send "back" and "left click plus forward" send "forward", or something akin to that.
These days, I use sway on Linux, which provides for a tiled desktop environment -- the computer sets the size of windows, which are mostly fullscreen, and I don't drag windows. But when I did, and before mice had the convention of using "back" and "forward" on Button 4 and Button 5, I really liked having the single-button-to-drag-anywhere functionality, though I never really found a use for the fifth button. If I were still using a non-tiled environment, I'd probably look into doing chording or something so that I could still do my "drag anywhere on the window" thing.
I'm an Xfce user, in the habit of dragging windows around with the "super" key + left mouse button.
For instant access to the browser back button, I have it positioned in the far top-left corner so that just swiping the mouse in that direction hits it without having to look at it. Unless it's on the other monitor, which is mildly annoying when it happens but you know, probably not by enough to change my decades-old habit of buying the cheapest and simplest mouse that's easily available and looks like it might not fall apart in a week, much the same way as I tend to shop for socks: reluctantly, when it's necessary.