Jittery mouse pointer when using high sensitivity mouse with high "Constant Deceleration" in xinput

Question

I'm on Linux Mint 15 (MATE edition) (based on Ubuntu 13.04), and I'm using a Logitech G700 mouse. Since the mouse has a pretty high sensitivity, and I don't like mouse pointer acceleration, I use the following bash script to get a well behaved mouse pointer:

#!/bin/bash

xinput set-prop 9 'Device Accel Profile' -1
xinput set-prop 9 'Device Accel Constant Deceleration' 2.5

# I'm not sure this does anything:
xinput set-prop 9 'Device Accel Velocity Scaling' 1.0

This removes all mouse acceleration, and turns down the pointer speed to a level I think is good. The problem is that the mouse pointer movement is kind of jittery and erratic. I can't really explain it, but it makes the pointer hard to control. I use the same mouse on Windows 7, where I turn of mouse acceleration using the SetPoint software, and there the pointer movement is perfect and very easy to control.

I tried lowering the sensitivity on the mouse itself and lowering the Constant Deceleration, but the problem persists. Does anyone know if there's any other way to fix this?

I found an option called "Softening" in the Xorg documentation, but I don't really know how to enable it. I'm guessing I have to edit the Xorg config file, but I'm unsure of how to do this.

Answer 1

It seems like the problem in this case was a hardware problem, not a software one. After getting a replacement mouse I no longer have any problems.

The strange thing is that I didn't have any real issues in Windows, but I guess that's some kind of smoothing process being applied by the OS or the drivers.