I’m getting really fed up both with the lack of mouse buttons on my Librem laptop and with GNOME. I finally gave up trying to make GNOME perform well and installed LXDE, only to find, as I’d honestly expected, that LXDE isn’t even reasonably usable without hardware mouse buttons.
The lack of mouse buttons is aggravating enough, but you really don’t know what desktop interface your users are going to prefer. For a company that’s about freedom, it’d be nice if you offered the hardware support necessary for users to be free to do things such as choose their own desktop interface. There’s no good reason for not including, at the very least, two mouse buttons, a left and a right. Even for some games, it can be helpful to hold the left and right button at the same time, and with only one hardware button, this simply isn’t possible on Librem hardware.
I’d really love to stick with Purism for my computer needs, as I want to support a company that’s actually working to produce open hardware specifications. But it’s incredibly difficult to do that when I find the computer you Purism sold me to actively fight against me on a daily basis. Please consider building laptops with a left and right mouse button. I’d love a middle mouse button as well, though I can make due without one if need be. I’m not sure how much longer I can stand working on this one-button-mouse laptop. I’m probably going to end up replacing it and putting it in storage, which really makes me sad, especially as it’s the most-expensive laptop I’ve ever owned, and I’ve been using it for only a few months.
Honestly, I’d never even heard of a one-button laptop mouse until this laptop arrived in the mail, and had I realised there weren’t sufficient mouse buttons on this machine, I would never have bought it. As Josch mentions, having a track stick would also be very nice, though again, I could live without that if I just had a second mouse button.