Since I'm gone for a while in another country for work, I have to use my laptop for pretty much everything I want to do online. This isn't bad at all because, after all, a laptop is nothing but a smaller computer, so pretty much everything works the same way it does on a desktop PC.
There are, of course, a few differences, such as a smaller screen, a touchpad, and most of the time less powerful components than on a good computer. Regardless of these differences, a laptop is an amazing tool that you can use to do pretty much everything you do on a normal desktop PC.
For me, the "worst" part about any laptop is the touchpad. It doesn't matter how good it is, it will never replace, at least for me, the mouse. I cannot be as accurate and as quick on my laptop as I am with my PC, because instead of a mouse I use the touchpad.
This can be annoying at times, especially when I have little time at my disposal to do a bunch of tasks and I need to be as quick as possible. Sure, I do have a mouse with me and I could sit at the table so that I can do everything the way I normally do it, but the main benefit of the laptop is its portability - I can take it in bed with me to both work and relax at the same time.
Because of this, I had to find ways to become as quick with my laptop as I am with my normal PC, and although I am not at the same level yet, I did get better at working with this portable computer, and the main reason for such progress is the use of shortcuts.
Knowing what keys to press and in which order to do things that you would normally have to do, in a much slower way, with a touchpad, can make you way faster than the average user and will allow you to do everything in a quicker way than if you'd do everything with the cursor.
For example, switching apps is, and will always be, much faster if you press alt-tab than if you individually select the app you want to use with your cursor.
The same thing applies to switching tabs on your browser. Why manually click on the tab you want when you can press Ctrl + any number form 1 to 10 to select one of the tabs you have open? And if you don't want to use the numbers you can just press Ctrl + Tab to cycle through them without needing to select anything.
Opening apps through the use of the "Windows key" on most Windows machines is so simple, yet it allows you to run everything you need so quickly compared to just searching through all the icons with your cursor to double click on the one you need.
If you're a Linux user, like me, knowing how to quickly open the terminal by pressing the right keys (in my case it's Windows key + T) can give you access to so many great tools. It can even help you turn off or restart your computer much faster, because all you have to do is open a terminal and write "poweroff" in it, rather than having to go to the menu of your OS, click on the "Power Off / Log Out" option and then confirm that you indeed want to turn off your computer or just log off. This is obviously different on each Linux distribution, but knowing how to do something as simple as turning off or restarting your PC using the terminal can make a big difference when you're in a hurry.
There are more examples that I can give, but the main idea is that knowing how to use shortcuts in general can help you become much faster, but it completely changes the way you use a laptop. You don't need to hope to be accurate with your touchpad to do basic things - you just need to know what keys to press. And once you learn enough of them, you'll be able to do your work so much faster than the average user who uses the touchpad for everything.