[anothergoogler]

* See my note about the trackpoint ... it's sort of terrible now. Matter of taste, granted.

* Yep. Never got good results.

* Yep, the issue was not with display layout (I did configure with arandr and then xrandr directly, but that had more to do with some distros supporting old pre-display config Xfce).

And yep, agreed, that's why I'm just using a desktop tower now. I'm not saying the issues I experienced are truly intractable, but I've been using desktop Linux at a low level for a while now and got to the point where I threw up my hands... ymmv.