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Matching mouse dpi and acceleration across Mac and Linux?
I use a Mac for work, Linux for my personal machine, and the same mouse between the two. I’m accustomed to the dpi/acceleration on Mac, so when I switch to my PC at the end of the day there are slight inaccuracies with the pointer. My wrist compensates to cover the gaps and I develop wrist strain after short periods of use.
Does anyone know how to make the Linux mouse dpi/acceleration as close to identical as possible with my Mac?
chimera linux w/ gnome btw
This is a bit oblique, so feel free to ignore it if anyone has a more direct answer, but there's a decent amount of info about normalising HID drivers between OSes in these build videos for a desktop smooth scroll wheel (second, third). They focus on scroll behaviour rather than tracking, for obvious reasons, but it's also clear the creator has done the kind of near-obsessive deep dive that it takes to get these things right, so the libraries and drivers he's using might be helpful to you?
Side note: this is what I love about open source! A profit motive will rarely get you better than "eh, good enough" - it takes someone who cares about the work they're doing to spend that much time getting it absolutely dead on, and I'm always happy to see more of that in the world
Thanks for the links! Hopefully I can find some answers in there. If not, they’re still cool videos.
There should be desktop-environment-level settings for this? Like, in KDE and Gnome. Also: some mice (pricier ones, of course) have an on-mouse DPI-changing button which can be configured.
e.g. KDE docs
For Gnome all I get is a slider for speed and a checkbox for acceleration, trying to sync that with Mac isn’t exactly a science. I haven’t looked on KDE but I expect it’s the same.
In hindsight I think I should’ve said mouse speed instead of dpi, because my mouse does control its own dpi.
I see a slider for pointer speed here in KDE mouse settings. In my experience, it provides fine-grained control. Can't speak to Gnome, though.
That’s part of the problem for me, a slider isn’t fine-grained. There’s a perceptible difference between the two OS’s, but it’s hard to tell which direction and how much the slider needs to move. The speed slider is moot if the acceleration isn’t the same either.
Hm. Sounds like you might be in a tough spot, then. Even if you get a mouse that has its own internal configuration (so it goes with you as you change computers), AFAIK, the OS/DE will also have its own settings that compound with the mouse's sensitivity, so you're going to have to set them at some point, I would expect. But, are you sure it's not fine-grained enough? My current KDE pointer speed value is "0.12", and it goes up and down in 0.01 increments. The difference between 0.11 and 0.14 was noticeable, but just barely.
I’ll need to experiment with KDE tonight before I write it off completely, I didn’t realize it had float values bound to the slider. Thanks.
For GNOME, you can edit those settings precisely using
gsettingsordconfwithin theorg.gnome.desktop.peripherals.mouseschema. Though I think that'll just let you set the slider more precisely. I find GNOME kind of useless if I want to change settings and transparently know what is happening. Part of my preference for KDE is more settings and increased transparency.This is an older post, but I expect you could still use it to direct you on precisely altering the mouse properties through
xinput.https://patrickmn.com/aside/lowering-gaming-mouse-sensitivity-in-ubuntu-9-10/
Haven't got a clue what Mac does.