Mouse movement quality in Ubuntu

[Martin Olsson]

Hi,

I always thought the mouse behaved a little weird in "Linux". When I 
would drag-and-sweep select something with the mouse very quickly I 
would often end up with a selection that was smaller than I intended. 
Clearly there was some kind latency problem because X.org didn't get the 
mouse down event until I had already moved the mouse cursor quit a bit.
I assume(d) that this was one of many unpolished things that would 
eventually be corrected.

Earlier this week a more experienced Linux user showed me a way to fix 
this problem. Apparently, if I edit my xorg.conf file and switch the 
mouse input driver to "evdev" the mouse becomes extremely snappy and 
high precision. When I select stuff, exactly what I intended is 
selected. I love it!

This little revelation made me realize that there is probably many 
people out there who are using Ubuntu with this kind of, not that 
severe, but still annoying mouse latency problems. Fixing this might be 
as simple as switching to "evdev" by default in Ubuntu (even though I 
admit that I have no idea about the actual difference in scope/purpose 
of the standard input driver versus the evdev driver).




Martin