I have a T540p at work, and the lack of touchpad buttons means you need an incredible amount of care when clicking. I don't really mind the keyboard, but that thing is torture without a mouse.
Haven't used my T540P with a GUI in quite a long time, I think I may have noticed that the bottom of the trackpad is trying to be like an apple trackpad button also, however I recall it working very poorly; the whole trackpad physically clicks very nicely and definitively for the upper buttons, and on the bottom it just works like crap. Perhaps they've improved that.
I've been posting all over this thread because I love my new T440s, so it looks kind of funny, but for me as a new Thinkpad user the clickpad as trackpoint buttons was really easy to get used to. I think it's actually worse as a touchpad, but as a Trackpoint I don't think you lose that much. I'd say give it a chance, I think they have a 30 day return window and I'd say you should easily figure out if you like it or not in that timeframe (you should verify the return window though, this is just what I'm remembering).
Ah gotcha. That makes total sense. I last like ten seconds each time I try to use the trackpad, probably because of lack of buttons. I probably need to replace my t440s soon because the ram/processor is problematic for my usage (gdal and geospatial data conversions, big gimp and inkscape files, simultaneous rails/npm servers for dev, etc). I’ll look into one with the sweet buttons.
razer blade pro has a different touchpad placement, it's on the right side of the keyboard. I also have some difficulties with the touchpad of my current laptop, I click it all the time.
Just be sure that you're comfortable with the trackpoint on the 450... They swapped the buttons for a touch sensitive area at the top of the trackpad. The physical buttons have made a welcome return on the T460 range, but if that doesn't bother you, enjoy a great machine.
A coworker got himself a T470p (I think), the trackpad hardware is fine, albeit a bit small for my taste; the problem to me is more about how it is leveraged by the software (OS) side of things: both Linux DEs and Windows make visual feedback of multitouch gestures feel weird somehow. Maybe that's a habit of mine being used to macOS though. I'm not overly fond of the trackpoint, but that's a nice option and it's right on the home row next to HJKL. I hate how the B letter is offset though, kinda ridiculous but I find it a real eyesore and an aesthetic failure somehow.
I might be the only one that likes this t440s style trackpad. I have no desire to mod it. I love that you physically click it. Coming from a macbook, I was at first baffled that apparently you can’t rest your thumb on it while moving the cursor, but I quickly got used to that. And now I can’t stand macbook trackpads!
Really liking my refurb t480 with Ubuntu, however the most annoying thing is that it’s seemingly impossible to get the 2 finger swipe back trackpad gesture working. Otherwise it’s been great.
New Lenovo trackpads are an absolute pain in the ass to use. I rage quit my T440s for this alone because on the long run in starts grinding your gears pretty hard. I am glad you had a good experience with it but I strongly recommend anyone considering it to actually try and experiment with it for a couple hours.
Does the pressure to click on the trackpad feel 'even' across the entire trackpad? For example, does clicking at the top feel the same as the bottom? That's something I never got used to on my ThinkPad, clicking on the top is basically impossible.
Are you able to configure the touchpad to support right-clicks under Linux? I'm curious because that's one thing that's been a pain for me when running Linux on an Apple laptops in the past.
reply