Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ruphin | Hacker News Reader

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Better Mouse Settings

- DESCRIPTION: Right now mouse acceleration is enabled by default, and for heavy mouse users this is really not usable. There is no way to change this behaviour in the mouse settings. The only way as a user to get a workable mouse configuration is with custom startup scripts, and it took me as an experienced Linux user and software engineer a long time to figure out exactly how (The recommended way to do this kept changing). Non-expert users cannot be expected to do the same. All it needs is a checkbox or possibly a slider in the Mouse & Touchpad settings to configure the acceleration speed.

- ROLE: Desktop User

View on HN

I switched from a Macbook air to Ubuntu on a Thinkpad this fall, and mouse/scroll settings were by far the most frustrating part of the transition. I ended up with a script I run every time I boot up my machine:

https://github.com/artursapek/dotfiles/blob/master/prefs.sh

It's nice that xinput exists for low-level tweaks, but it seemed necessary because the GUI is so lacking. I still don't think I completely understand what settings I'm changing, but everything feels normal now.

The trackpad scrolling still doesn't feel nearly as good as on a mac, but I've gotten used to it.

I think you should be able to put those settings into your X11 configuration so you don't have to re-configure every time you boot, unless xinput on Ubuntu is different from Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput#Common_options (Although debugging xorg config files is not a terribly fun exercise :/)

I fully agree with the post above me. This is so annoying. Why is acceleration default and why isn't there a setting for it?

This is also something that may scare away casual users such as gamers, where acceleration is not acceptable.

Mouse scroll/wheel acceleration is also sth which gives a very natural feeling on osx but which is missing in Linux. Together with that, pixel-based scrolling, not line based.

On windows I can chance the scroll speed so its one line per tick, on ubuntu its stuck at 3 lines per tick. I have a logitech 'spinny wheel' and this makes it very frustrating as the screen zooms by and I lose precision.

I agree wholeheartedly!

The default mouse settings are unusable, and it is impossible to get it good, but with a lot of fiddling it's almost possible to get rid of the weird acceleration.

Sensible defaults for mouse: fixed scaling (downscaling) without smoothing.

Sensible defaults for pad: fixed scaling (or minimal acceleration) with some minimal smoothing.

For future reference for people suffering from this issue, the most reliable solution I found so far is to add the following lines to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-mouse.conf

  Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "mouse"
    MatchIsPointer "on"
    Option "AccelerationProfile" "-1"
    Option "AccelerationScheme" "none"
  EndSection

+1. It made me quit Ubuntu, along with another bug (Ethernet authentication).

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- ROLE: Java developer, now founder

I just saw your comment after posting a fairly similar one myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14005808

Last time I was using Ubuntu consistently I was shocked by this deficiency +1

A thousand times this.

+1 was about to post the same thing

Reply on news.ycombinator.com