Acceleration is broken

I have tested 6 different mice, and I found that the current implementation of speed and acceleration to be problematic.

If you enable acceleration 5 out of 6 mice move unpredictably on the screen. And in the 1 left it isn't noticeable just due to how budget and imprecise the mouse is by itself.

So you quickly conclude that, for any mouse, it's better to leave acceleration off.

Yet if you do so fixed dpi mice, 5 out of 6, become too slow to be usable. Hence you decide to increase mouse speed. But by doing so you hit the second problem, that any speed beyond 0.25 will make the mouse to lose precision. At small movements the animation becomes inconsistent.

Then you start wondering if there is any way to customize acceleration instead. But there is none.

So we reach the underlying problem:

• There's a reason why, at a low level, you shall separate mechanisms from policy (as xserver did). That at the lib level you shall allow as much configuration as possible, letting the UI to choose which settings to expose or hide to the user. Hence developers have flexibility to test ideas.
• Yet having a high degree of configuration shall go with having nice defaults.

changed title from The current implementation of acceleration to Acceleration is broken

changed the description

Then you start wondering if there is any way to customize acceleration instead. But there is none.

See The custom acceleration profile.

closed