It’s pretty nice if you treat it as a basic travel mouse, but don’t pick one up expecting to use a lot of muti-touch gestures.
Okay, even for me, that review was a bit too short. Let’s expand:
Although I’m primarily a trackpad user in my day-to-day life, I had been wanting a small, portable mouse that I can keep in my laptop bag for the rare occasion when I’m doing something where a mouse would be handy or even just pleasant to use. Having previously sworn off plastic mice, the Apple Magic Mouse is really one of the few contenders that meets my needs in terms of build materials and durability. I had one a long time ago, back before they had either Lightning or USB-C connectors and instead required installing two AA batteries. Back then I liked the mouse pretty well, but given that a decade has passed I thought it might be well worth picking another one up.
I had also recently read that there is expanded gesture support for Magic Mice in the latest Linux distro releases, which I was excited about testing. So, I placed an order for one, picked it up, and tried to connect it to my laptop.
I was a bit surprised at first when, after pairing the mouse, most of the features didn’t work. It was minimally useful as a pointing device, but not much good beyond that. That’s when I discovered that although the USB-C Magic Trackpad had gained support in the 6.13 Linux Kernel (and backported to various LTS versions), the USB-C Magic Mouse on the other hand did not get added until version 6.16 of the Linux Kernel. Although that version is now available in some of the distributions, when I got the mouse a couple months ago it very much was not. A quick upgrade to the Fedora Rawhide kernel later (which worked very well for me, but I would not recommend as a general practice) and I was in business.
The mouse feels solid. I love the aluminum and glass design. It fits well in a small pocket in my laptop bag and doesn’t add much bulk nor weight. I know people mock these things because the charging port (which I have yet to use beyond the initial charge) is on the bottom, and it’s not the most ergonomic design on the planet, but neither of these factors bother me in the slightest. If and when it needs a recharge I’ll flip it upside down for 10 minutes and go refill my water. And I like how flat it is, because it lets me keep my hand relatively flat, and also I can grip it a few different ways to find the one that’s most comfortable.
I was hoping that the updated gesture support would allow me to use the two-finger swipe left and right to go back and forward in apps that support it (like Firefox), and I was hoping that the three-finger gestures would allow me to open the Activites overview in GNOME. Alas, no nice. You can pan around and point to things, you can push in to click, and you can use two fingers to either right-click or scroll. Beyond that, there are no other functional gestures.
This thing is ideal to throw in a backpack and lug around to coffee shops and hotel rooms. That’s why I have it. If you’re looking to use it every minute of every day, or are hoping to take full advantage of the multi-touch surface (one of the key selling points, admittedly) and are a Linux user, this probably isn’t the mouse for you.