Sort of! I grew up with a mix of mice and trackballs (my mother was a diehard baller since the late 80s and still is,) I own several, and... I guess the best way I can describe my feeling is that the trackball feels like the hero we deserve, but I am too small and pitiful a creature to appreciate it fully. I have never been able to main a trackball for very long and I can't fully explain why. They are in several ways objectively superior to mice, and the only real problem I can think of (the mechanical ball gathering dust, etc.) is possibly solvable.
I was just speculating the other day on whether you couldn't simply turn an optical mouse mechanism upside down, mount it to a spherical ultra-fisheye lens, and then have it track the texture of your finger exactly as it does a desk surface. it should work, right? this would produce a trackball with a nonmoving ball, and with modern oleophobic coatings it should be possible to keep it clean.
A difficulty with this question is that there are... by my reckoning three broad categories of trackball that feel very different to actually use.
- Thumb trackballs. These are the most common, i think, and generally the most affordable. They generally have a very small ball, and the rest tends to just look like a mouse that doesn't move. The Logitech Trackman Wheel or Elecom Ex are the ones I'm the most familiar with. I hate these.
- Index finger trackballs. These have a slightly larger ball towards the front. Elecom's Deft or Huge , Microsoft's Intellimouse Trackball and Trackball explorer fit this bill. They generally have a slightly larger ball and I like them a little better.
- Palm trackballs. These are the big boys. Kensington's Export Mouse, CH Products' DT225, and the X-keys CST series. They tend to be very expensive and are the kind i like the best.
And liking any one of these does not necessarily correlate with liking any of the others. Making it potentially a several hundred dollar process to find out if you "like trackballs."