[grishka]

Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose.

On your scrolling complaint — well, there's this desktop-specific thing that OP doesn't mention but that becomes very apparent once you start looking for it in old-school desktop UIs. Controls never, ever scroll. Only content does. If controls don't fit into a window, you don't make it scrollable — you split it into tabs or you put the extra controls into a separate window that opens via a button. This appears to be universal at least for Windows and macOS.

[NikolaNovak]

I've had touchscreen laptops for about 7years now. The only time that the touchscreen gets used is when somebody is showing me something, doesn't realize it's a touchscreen, and accidentally borks whatever we were looking at.

It's strange - I love to optimize my flow, but I just haven't yet hit a situation where my hands leaving keyboard and touching the screen is faster. (I'm a die-hard and proficient track point user,and my hands never leave keyboard, so maybe I'm a special weird case?)

[Ensorceled]

Reaching for the screen all the time also sounds like a shoulder RSI just waiting to happen.

[JohnFen]

> is when somebody is showing me something, doesn't realize it's a touchscreen, and accidentally borks whatever we were looking at.

It's funny -- I've been using my work laptop for over a year and only yesterday discovered that it has a touch screen by doing exactly this.

I haven't bothered to figure out how to disable the touchscreen yet, but it's on my todo list.

[indymike]

> Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose.

When I was doing a lot Android development, it was nice to be able to test touch without loading on a phone. It was equally nice to be able to markup screenshots with the pan. I switched to Linux from Windows a couple years ago and the new laptop doesn't have touch (it does have a giant 17" panel and all day battery), so I keep a tablet that has a stylus in the bag for doing UI markup and bug reports. I may switch to the 16" Gram because it does have touch and stylus... and I won't have to carry the tablet.

[high_priest]

I have to admit that using a touchscreen laptop with a decent pen has made my university life a breeze. Ability to whip out a laptop and have all the notes, from all the years, searchable, with drawings just as good as when they were drawn and even better, because I can fix them and annotate them anytime... makes me feel like a terminator machine.

And it is the main reason I am stuck with Windows, despite also enjoying the 'normal' pc experience on linux much more than Windows bloat.

[kvmet]

I have a touchscreen laptop for work and the only real use I've found is testing the behavior of touch-only HMIs.

[brazzy]

But then you need fixed window sizes, which is pretty damn annoying as well.

[grishka]

That same Microsoft solved that nicely in win32 by using "DLUs", or "dialog units", for layouts. These scale with the font.

[premysl]

DLUs solve the wrong problem.

You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

[grishka]

> You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

What kind of extra work DO they need? I can only think of RTL layouts but I don't remember whether win32 "dialogs" loaded from resources automatically mirror the layout for RTL languages.

> Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

Desktop Linux is an unfixable dumpster fire UX-wise. Don't even get me started.

A serious problem with many open-source GUIs, but especially those on Linux, is that they're built backwards: you first write the code, then build the UI. Your UI ends up being shaped by the underlying implementation of the thing it controls. When in reality you want to do it the other way around: you'd formulate user requirements ("they need to be able to do X and Y"), you'd think through all possible scenarios that the UI must accommodate, you'd make a rough outline of what a UI satisfying all these requirements would look like, and only THEN would you start actually writing any code.

[JohnFen]

> Desktop Linux is an unfixable dumpster fire UX-wise.

This is exactly how I feel about Windows. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.