AmiMoJo's Journal: Linux and the mouse wheel

So, mouse wheel input is fucked in Linux.

There is no way to configure how much the wheel scrolls by. It's fixed. And it's incredibly slow in many apps, and inconsistent between apps because it's up to each one what it does with a single scroll "tick".

Some people have asked on forums and Stack Exchange how to fix it. Turns out, you can't. You can hack around with imwheel, but it translates the wheel into key presses and breaks some apps and is ignored by others. There is libinput, but when I tried it configuration changes had no effect in Cinnamon.

How can something so basic be so broken? It's actually better if you have a trackpad because at least that is configurable.

Chrome is more or less usable if you install an extension to speed up scrolling. Scrolling is not as smooth as Windows, but that could be cause it is running in a VM.

You may need to install extra vm software

[BarbaraHudson]

If you're using virtualbox, you need to install an extra package (in addition to virtualbox itself) that addresses mouse handling. Also, other distros allow you to configure the number of lines a mouse scroll moves, pointer acceleration, etc. If you have enough space, try openSUSE - the latest ubuntu-based distros have problems with the displays under virtualbox, and will let you adjust the lines per scroll easily - no need to install crap, just click.

Also, QT-based applications aren't going to be speed de

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair, updates are about 500x faster than Windows. It takes a few seconds to check and most of the updates install without a reboot. It's actually really great, apart from that one message I had.

I'm using VMWare because I've never been able to get USB working properly on VirtualBox (Windows host). Ubuntu seems like the next one to try.

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[BarbaraHudson]

I find windows updates to be super fast - but then again. that's because they're turned off, and it only takes a couple of seconds to dismiss the nag screen once a month. The only thing that's keeping me from wiping the drive and installing linux as the host os is inertia (and nvda).

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[AmiMoJo]

Can you actually turn off updates on Windows 10? I think even blocking the servers via hosts doesn't work.

I'm currently on Windows 8.1, but some stuff doesn't work very well and my system dates back from 2011. Performance is fine, but things like the Intel SATA ports are buggy and they stopped offering updates long ago. Could get a nice new Ryzen system, except that 8.1 doesn't support Ryzen.

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[BarbaraHudson]

On 8.1 you can turn off updates. As for ryzen, 8.1 should work fine - it just won't support the more advanced cpu-specific features. Linux does, so just run 8.1 in a vm - the host OS will take care of ryzen multi-threading and other stuff.

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[AmiMoJo]

Apparently if you try to use 8.1 on Ryzen it won't let you install updates, or so claims Microsoft. I have not actually tried it.

That might not actually be a problem, thinking about it. Maybe the updates will install manually, via WSUS Offline Update.

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[BarbaraHudson]

Do you really need updates? Worse case scenario, run XP in a vm and, using the POS registry hack [ghacks.net], update it - you're good until April 2019.

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[AmiMoJo]

If I ran Windows in a VM I wouldn't even give it internet access, or at least block the Windows Update servers.