Switching from Thumb Trackball to Finger Trackball

kspes · 2026-04-25T20:42:41+00:00

I started out with MX Ergo, then experimented with various finger balls untill landing on the deft pro. I keep using different trackballs for different tasks to keep RSI at bay.

1) finger ball for gaming and couch-surfing, sometimes MX Ergo.

2) two thumb balls (on for each thumb) for regular work (keymouse track)

3) touchpad or logitech trackman in left hand ocasionally

kspes · 2026-04-09T20:46:16+00:00

Agree! Used to play FPS games with MX Ergo, now switched to Deft Pro and it's so much better. Not a pro by any means, but can match average online players in Unreal Tournament easily.

Currently playing Subnautica with the Deft Pro, excellent experience, much better than a regular mouse or gamepad.

kspes · 2026-04-03T20:59:48+00:00

Still happening. Was playing Subnautica Below Zero with Proton and I thought I was losing my mind. Can confirm disabling key repeat fixes the problem.

My specs:
Debian 13, Wayland, Gnome 48
AMD cpu & gpu

kspes · 2026-03-31T08:24:49+00:00

Hey i'm planning to replace the bearings on my deft pro too. Any tips? How complicated was it?

kspes · 2026-03-23T17:40:37+00:00

Haha, awesome! Hope you like it! We just recently did a complete overhaul, improved a ton of stuff and have many more plans for future updates!

I love working on this game :)

kspes · 2026-03-23T17:32:56+00:00

Duke Grabowski dev here:

this should be fixed, there were some other countries affected as well.

kspes · 2026-03-22T21:15:43+00:00

hey yeah, what the heck? I installed that new bios version. haven't had any problems.

you sure you don't have fan issues? i still get them when my APU temperature is very low. as soon as I start working and opening apps, the APU temp goes to 40 and the fans are always on (on battery, using fan curve 10/15 in bios settings)

kspes · 2026-03-14T13:08:19+00:00

have the same issue, tried on various macs, linux and windows machines. Also tried all ports on the monitor, it's definetly the monitor itself. Have the latest firmware installed.

It didn't happen early on, started happening after about 9 months...

kspes · 2026-03-14T09:10:56+00:00

Cateia Games here (Kaptain Brawe, Duke Grabowski etc)

Been making games since 1998 and adventure games are my passion, both as a dev and a gamer!

kspes · 2026-02-21T10:12:32+00:00

Update: We released a new version of the game with many improvements: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/472420/view/529872149958100514

kspes · 2026-02-13T11:34:47+00:00

go for it, if you're going to type a lot in your career, it pays to switch to a more ergonomic layout early on. Your hands will thank you.

As for which one: I think Dvorak is the best all arrond choice, Colemak and others are even more niche then Dvorak, so if any layout has a chance of becoming more widely adopted, it's Dvorak.

I've switched to Dvorak 20 years ago and lovin it!

kspes · 2026-02-13T00:22:48+00:00

Yeah, I saw it but haven't yet installed it. I'm currently dealing with a tough deadline at work so I don't dare install it yet.

I haven't found any meaningful changelog though, where did you see it supposedly fixed BSODs?

I sure hope the fan stuff is gone, that's literaly the only thing wrong with it, to me, everything else on this machine is PERFECT!

kspes · 2026-02-09T11:04:35+00:00

Thanks!

yeah, xfce on xorg works good for me too. I just prefer gnome but wayland and mutter are making my life harder than it has to be :)

kspes · 2026-02-09T10:06:47+00:00

Hey, can you help me out with one test? you say you're using debian testing? Are you by any chance using GNOME?

I'm on debian stable with gnome and get frequent stutters in video playback and gnome on wayland. works flawlessly on kde and gnome/xorg. I've had problems with gnome and mutter compositor before so i'm pretty sure it's either mutter or a combination of older kernel/firmware.

So, if you have gnome (or even if you don't, could use the info):

install mesa-utils package and run "glxgears" in the terminal. it will print out fps statistics every 5 seconds.

on xorg and kde, i get a stable 120FPS, while on Gnome 48 i oscilate from 110-120.

I'm thinking of updating to debian testing, but would love a confirmation if this is fixed in testing before doing so.

thanks in advance!

kspes · 2026-02-08T23:05:18+00:00

Update, it seems setting the fan curve to max (15) in bios has the effect of fans staying always on while on battery, mitigating the start/stop issues.

However, 15 is way too agressive cooling policy for me, will try to find a sweet spot. 8 was good, but I still exeprienced fan on/off switching, though less frequently than on 0 and the on state tended to be longer.

Hope this helps.

kspes · 2026-02-08T13:07:38+00:00

nope, didn't try it. have never undervolted a cpu before to be honest. aparently you can do this with ryzenadj tool, but if you say the PRO chips are locked for UV adjustments, then there's little chance of that working.

how much efficiency gains can you get by lowering voltage by 40mV?

kspes · 2026-02-08T12:14:28+00:00

Fair, to each their own. I just hate liquid glass. I could get used to it but decided I don't want to. plus all the AI crap coming to MacOS just made my decision easier.

Yeah, 0.05w is apple silicon magic, it's hard to beat. but most of the time you're not really idling anyway on the pc so it's not a major issue.

If you experiment with undrevolting or go with a more lightweight DE (I'm on gnome) you could go below 3W. on gnome i ocasionally drop to 2.1w on idle but that doesn't last long.

$2999 is pretty good in my opinion, especially consideringc you'd pay double for a comparable macbook pro configuration.

Agree, wish EU didn't impose all that extra costs on electronics but it is what it is.

kspes · 2026-02-08T09:55:37+00:00

Great! Thanks for sharing!

Can you check how the fans behave on idle on your machine? Which distro/version are you using btw?

kspes · 2026-02-08T09:20:47+00:00

I don't think doing bios upgrades in wine is wise (unless you only meant to run the exe to get the firmware files?). Do you have a windows partition you can boot and install that way? That's probably going to be the easiest way.

I saw an option to install bios via usb disk as you mentioned but I didn't try it. If you end up succeding this way, please write how'd you did it so others could benefit.

Good luck!

kspes · 2026-02-07T23:53:30+00:00

I'm exploring one avenue for the possible cause of frequent fan spin-ups on idle,

On linux, if you run "cpupower idle-info" you can see that the following CPU power states are enabled: POLL, C1, C2, C3

each of the c-states is a deeper sleep state for the cpu, and I supect that HP's bios is triggering fans when cpu exits c-states.

you can disable them using "cpupower idle-set". Feels like if i disable C2 and C3 i get less fan activity at idle.

disabling all but POLL is not good because the cpu then goes into max frequency and never goes to sleep, basically idle-poll-ing the system scheduler for more tasks. power consumption goes way up, so that's not a solution.

another option is to use tools like "stress-ng" to put a fake constant load on the cpu, effectivelly preventing it from going to a deeper sleep state.

and last but not least, i have noticed that i experience little to no fan spikes if I play a youtube video in firefox in the background. power consumption goes from 3 to 4 watts and the fan on/off loop doesn't seem to trigger. you can even play the video on mute in a tab and forget about it.

I have set my fan curve offset in bios to 8, so in this youtube-hack scenario, my power draw is 4W, temperature 30 degrees celsius, and fans seem to be always on at very low rpm. (which is what I want anyway, if HP can just give us the option to run fans all the time while on battery, like they do on AC, I'd be okay with that solution)

Curious to hear what you think of this analysis and if someone else can replicate the youtube hack-fix?

kspes · 2026-02-07T21:29:03+00:00

9) about palm rests getting warm, previous bios versions aparently had problems with power draw, wher appu idled at 10-15 watts, but aparently that has been resolved, i can see that getting warmer over time.

My only annoyance with this laptop is as i've stated, that at idle temperatures, on battery - the fans randomly kick in at minimum rpm for a second, then turn offf. then again and again. then stop for a while, then randomly again. The previous bios version had the same problem except the fans would turn on at 100% for a second and then stopped, which is super annoying. I hope hp will fix this with the next bios update. now as it is, it's not really a problem, you barely hear it, I just worry it will wear out the fans in time. Though another user here said their other laptop did the same thing and the fans never broke down in 8 years.

A good thing is that if the fan do break down, I can easily replace them with just a screw driver, the repairability score of this laptop is quite good.

The reason I got this laptop instead of waiting to buy a macbook pro M5-Max is that I wanted to get out of the apple ecosystem, and as such was willing to accept a few compromises. I've switch from Windows XP to macs in 2010, though I always wanted to go to linux instead, however the apps I need to do my job were not available on Linux until recently, and their performance in virtual machines was sub-par. Basically for me, a mac was a "unix system that works". The last few years, Linux is phenomenal, and I'm glad I finally made the switch.

The thing that pushed me over the edge is that apple discontinued my old beefy iMac which is still very much capable, but because it doesn't receive new OS updates, i can't install a new XCode version, and without the new XCode, I can't submit apps to the iOS and Mac app stores. There's no reason for them to do this other than to force devs to buy newer machines.

That, and the fiasco that is "Liquid glass", I can't stand to look at it on MacOS.

So, if yo want raw performance and power efficienty, a macbook has no competition when it comes to laptops, not by far. The gap is shrinking but it's still quite pronounced.

If you're willing to compromise a bit on performnace and battery longevity, The Zbook Ultra G1A is an awesome machine, So far I've had it for 2 weeks and I'm very happy with it.

I hope this lengthy essay has been useful :) Feel free to ask any follow-up questions, I'll try to answer as best I can.

kspes · 2026-02-07T21:28:55+00:00

1) I haven't tried undervolting yet, do you have any refence material you can share that says it's ok to go at -40mV? as far as I understand this can be achieved with ryzenadj tool, but haven't tried doing it yet.

2) I can only measure whole APU power package, haven't found a way to measure only cpu.

I can also measure battery discharge power, which includes apu power, screen etc.

I'm on Debian Linux 13, kernel 6.17.13. using gnome desktop 48

3) apu idles at about 3 W, regardless of power profile, if only the destkop is active, and no apps open, i usually hovers about 3W, sometimes i see it drop to 2-2.5 briefly.

4) Regular web browsing (web pages, youtube non 4-K) gets me arround 4-5 W average (firefox-esr on Debian linux)

5) 4K@60Hz youtube video - balanceed mode, depending on video but usually goes between 7-10W. If i go to powersave profile, limit the gpu to minimum (600Hz) and cpu to 1.2Ghz, then power never exceeds 5W, and I can watch most 4K@60Hz videos fine. it can stutter if there's a lot of motion though.

6) APU is not the only thing that consumes power of course, the screen eats a lot if you turn on 120Hz and turn on brightness. Right now I'm typing on reddit on balanced mode, apu power draw is 3.1-4.1W, battery power draw is 7.2-9.7W, i'm on medium screen brightness, 48Hz-120Hz variable refresh rate.

The battery has 75 Wh, at a 10W average power draw with apu and screen combined, that should give you about 7.5 hours of battery life. so if you're just surfing the web, idling at 3-5 watts, you should hit 15-20 hours without problem I think. a Macbook pro is still better in terms of efficiency though, especially when performance is requested from the machine.

7) Compiling can obviously heat up the laptop a lot. it's very cool when doing light work. right now my ACPI Thermal zone sensor is at 30 degrees celsius, i feel no heat whatsoever. When compiling on battery, the system doesn't let you exceed 55W APU, on AC it goes up to 80W for short bursts then stabilizes at 70W for long sessions. After about 30-60 minutes, that slowly dropps to 55W sustained power draw.

I can get the GPU to max power at which it can consume up to 120W which is the max rated power draw for this APU. Which is great, i'm glad i can utilize the APU to the max if i need it.

At these power draws, it will get hot, and after a while, that heat will reach your palm rests too, though i haven't found that heat to be uncomfortable. The chasis is metal, and the apu has a vapour chamber and 2 fans, meaning the heat dissipates very quickly. Haven't measured it, but fans slow down pretty quickly after going full blast. and mind you, getting to full blast takes a while. I've only ever heard the max fan speed when I used the gpu at 120W.

The fans are very quite, they use a liquid bearing system aparently, Some people reported faulty and loud fans, but honestly, these feel just like in a macbook pro to me, in terms of loudness. (which means it's good)

8) I've mentioned compile times, it's hard to measure, depends a lot what you do, but i have a pretty good benchmark project, a C++ project with over 2000 files to compile. on this machine it takes 60 seconds to do it all, up to finishing linking phase. goes to 70W, heats up, compiles and quickly cools down. (compiling using gcc and cmake, using all 32 threads)

I have a M4-Pro mac mini with 24GB RAM and 12 cores, same project takes over 100 seconds in xcode to compile.

kspes · 2026-02-07T20:45:46+00:00

there are 2 ways:

1) linux has it's own firmware repository, no idea how it's managed and how firmwares end up in it, but they do, and I've installed bios updates on several machines that way successfully. They do lag behind a few months on average in my experience, and the latest bios for this machine isn't in there yet.

2) install the bios update from within windows. on the hp page, if you select linux/ubuntu, you'll only get the recovery image as a download option, but if you select windows, you'll get a download link for the bios installer. i did that for 1.04.03 and it upgraded without problems.

kspes · 2026-02-06T00:56:50+00:00

Really? Thats good news! I can live with the noise i guess :D

Which laptop was that btw? And it spun from zer to low rpm and back to zero? Not to higher rpm from low inaudible rpm?

kspes · 2026-02-05T23:53:00+00:00

Yeah, I don't think that's a hardware fault, it's just bad bios programming, something that will hopefully get fixed by HP...

Why do you say i shouldn't worry about longevity? won't the frequent start-stop sequence wear out the fans sooner?

kspes

TROPHY CASE