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Comment by erikbye | Hacker News Reader

Many of these complaints are resolved by using another desktop environment, e.g. KDE.

Others of the distro (use another one if you want up-to-date packages).

I last used KDE about a year ago, so I'm not sure if this is still a problem, but even KDE doesn't let you slow down mouse cursor speed, only make it faster. Is that still the case?

They didn't even have a slider for controlling mouse speed, only a numerical text entry. It boggles the mind.

The "Mouse" Systems Setting I have on screen on my up-to-date KDE right now has a slider for pointer speed with no numerical entry. There is only a small handful of other settings that quite useful (acceleration profile, invert scroll direction, and a couple other things). KDE has been working hard on usability lately.

Yes the KDE Usability & Productivity initiative helped a lot making KDE suck less in this regard. A lot of configuration dialogs were improved, a lot of small irritating bugs were fixed and the default are more sane now. And because Nate Graham blog about all these changes every week, KDE also got a lot of new contributors.

Btw Plasma 5.17 will be released tomorrow, so all the improvements of the last 6 months will be available very soon.

KDE's pointer acceleration settings have never worked on X11 unfortunately.

...for you. For me they always worked, maybe not around the time of the libinput transition.

There were no mouse acceleration options for Plasma until release 5.13 which was released in 2018, which is well after the libinput transition. Essentially since the feature was added there's been an open bug report on it not working on X11.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398713

Settings->Input Devices->Mouse

There is a slider for adjusting pointer speed.

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