Asklemmy

I have never owned one. As a creative, I already have other devices for stylus use (iPad and Wacom). I see touch screen on laptop as a gimmick, as a rub in the face that the iPad isn’t shipping with a real unlocked OS already. It’s a good way to make the display dirty with finger grease. A good way to realize how flimzy they are.

I find it more convenient on the train, than fumbling with touchpad or the mouse on my knee. It even beats the keyboard nipple. And using Niri with it is a joy.

The best use I have is if I'm filling on a huge form with lots of checkboxes. Steering the mouse to each one with a track pad is so fiddly compared to just tapping.

And for dragging maps around, where I don't have to with press to click or tap and hold every drag.

Touchscreens can serve a function. And that's predominantly when you have your laptop atop your lap. In a cafe or on a plane where even operating your touchpad may be hard for a lack of space (or for me size of gut). On the couch is another scenario like that. If you don't encounter those situations a lot, don't get it, especially if it's more expensive. If you hate fingerprints on any screen, don't get it. If you're not sure and money isn't an issue, take the extra feature.

Depends what you do with it obviously. Lighting software like Chamsys or Grand MA screams for touchscreen. For work I also need a Mac, and I stupidly hit the screen all the time.

If you're not into graphics / art design enough to have a separate wacom tablet, again it is useful in a pinch.

There's no "it's good!" no "it's bad!", it is just a matter of how useful it is for you. I don't know on windows, but with Gnome touchscreens work very well.

Sometimes it's faster to lift my finger to tap than go to the touchpad and move that + click, but it's not often

Heresy

Mostly dependent on whether I want to be quiet with my device or am doing art, or if I'm doing like anything else. I didn't know the last laptop I bought even had touchscreen capabilities, and I wasn't really used to them on a laptop outside of a faulty toaster of a laptop I got nearly a decade ago, all before getting a new laptop a few years back.

Over time I've basically only ever used the touchscreen for digital art and the sort, playing certain games but don't want others in the library to hear my mouse clicks, and taking notes for like a single college course.

Otherwise, I don't really care about it since most of the time if I'm using it, the cursor will absolutely jump places because something like the side of my wrist or part of my forearm will be detected. Yeah, I need one of those drawing gloves to fix the problems I have, but that ain't happening since I have more important matters to attend to.

I think it would be better for simpler UIs. I've heard GNOME with touchpad is a solid experience

There are two times when i use it -

1 - when the touchpad stops working

2 - i have some work screens that involve checking boxes and signing.

Only good if the laptop has a proper tablet mode for note-taking/drawing with a pen stored inside a chassis slot. I've a non-convertible Thinkpad that for whatever reason has a touchscreen and I end up activating it by accident more than on purpose. It also seems that the additional electric fields associated with the touch functionality makes the screen attract far more dust than any non-touch laptop.

I had a Chromebook with touchscreen. I'd mostly just use it to tap on links when browsing lying on my back.

But I developed the bad habit of trying to do the same on my work laptop.

It a nice toy.but not having a touchscreen on a laptop is not a deal-breaker for me, other than low-resolution screens (everything below roughly 200 DPI).

I like those for very bad laptops, like when the touchpad is buggy I can still use the touchscreen

Every screen should be a touchscreen. We have kids growing up with touchscreen devices who then have to learn not all screens respond to touch even though it’s showing the same stuff. And it’s not just content but apps too. Microsoft has been pushing touchscreen PCs for years, trying to convince developers to build for them, bringing in support for Android apps. Apple waits years to ship a touchscreen on a MacBook that can run every iPhone and iPad app natively.