One major change is that it now defaults to select with left click, which should help things.
There's also an official Pie Menus add-on that lets you fit more controls in a smaller laptop keyboard. Numpad is the normal way to switch between view directions, but having them in a radial menu keeps it reasonably usable.
Lack of middle-mouse drag could be awkward and I don't know the solution off the top of my head, but I imagine there's something. You need to have both pan and zoom, I'd guess one is via two-finger scrolling and the other adds a modifier key?
Pie menus are actually build into Blender now, but there's also a great Pie Menu Editor add-on that lets you easily build you own pie menus and other user interface widgets without coding in Python! Which is very important for making efficient custom workflows.
Alias (and now Autodesk) has been abusing the patent system and spreading FUD about marking/pie/radial menus being patented for decades, which inhibited 3dsmax and Blender from supporting them for many years. But now Blender has excellent support for pie menus, and they're not encumbered by patents.
Autodesk Advertisement About “Patented Marking Menus”:
>The Alias Marking Menu Patent Discouraged the Open Source Blender Community from Using Pie Menus for Decades
>Here is another example that of how that long term marketing FUD succeeded in holding back progress: the Blender community was discussing when the marking menu patent would expire, in anticipation of when they might finally be able to use marking menus in blender (even though it has always been fine to use pie menus).
>As the following discussion shows, there is a lot of purposefully sewn confusion and misunderstanding about the difference between marking menus and pie menus, and what exactly is patented, because of the inconsistent and inaccurate definitions and mistakes in the papers and patents and Alias’s marketing FUD:
>"Hi. In a recently closed topic regarding pie menus, LiquidApe said that marking menus are a patent of Autodesk, a patent that would expire shortly. The question is: When ? When could marking menus be usable in Blender ? I couldn’t find any info on internet, mabie some of you know."
There's also an official Pie Menus add-on that lets you fit more controls in a smaller laptop keyboard. Numpad is the normal way to switch between view directions, but having them in a radial menu keeps it reasonably usable.
Lack of middle-mouse drag could be awkward and I don't know the solution off the top of my head, but I imagine there's something. You need to have both pan and zoom, I'd guess one is via two-finger scrolling and the other adds a modifier key?