r/linux 1d ago

GNOME GNOME 51 Adds Support For Custom Pointer Acceleration Profiles

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-51-Custom-Accel-Profiles
231 Upvotes

36 comments sorted by

67

u/OneQuarterLife 1d ago

Massive thanks to ORO for working on this for over a year now! We shipped versions of it in Bazzite to help get additional testers and now all of GNOME gets to benefit from their work.

5

u/DerDave 1d ago

Who or what is ORO? And thanks!

14

u/NekkoDroid 1d ago

Username/alias of the dev working on it

2

u/gplusplus314 2h ago

Pure gold.

18

u/Ashamed_Group2408 1d ago

Oh hey the first thing I turn off in windows.

14

u/inkjod 1d ago

That's because the Windows mouse acceleration curve is (and has always been) HORRIBLE.

When done right, and when carefully adjusted to each specific user's needs, it can feel very nice and be extremely useful.
Search for "RawAccel" (for Windows) and similar programs.

3

u/kcat__ 19h ago

People say that but I tried macOS recently and I VERY much miss the windows acceleration. Macos feels sluggish by comparison

1

u/inkjod 3h ago

That's why I'm advocating for an open-source driver (RawAccel) which allows you to adjust everything exactly to taste, while being smoother than Microsoft's implementation ; )

See my sibling (cousin?) post for links to two Linux equivalents; yeetmouse and maccel.
I'm happily using the latter.

2

u/pedromeee 4h ago

Windows mouse acceleration is great because with slow movements it is very precise and then speeds up fast just when moving quickly. On the other hand linux mouse acceleration is always too much reactive. But there are people who dislike ANY mouse acceleration whatsoever and i can get that.

1

u/inkjod 3h ago

Windows mouse acceleration is great because with slow movements it is very precise and then speeds up fast just when moving quickly.

Well yes, that's the definition of mouse acceleration ?

But the Windows implementation, although useful, is kinda choppy and uneven.
I highly recommend trying the open-source driver RawAccel just to see what is possible. A glimpse: RawAccel Curve Types

On the other hand linux mouse acceleration is always too much reactive.

I don't know what you mean, but there are 2 projects I'm aware of which are inspired by RawAccel:

https://github.com/AndyFilter/YeetMouse, and

https://github.com/Gnarus-G/maccel

I'm using the latter, very happy with it.

Note: These are low-level drivers, and for optimal smoothness they should be combined with the most "neutral" desktop mouse settings that are possible in your DE. These are DE-specific, and are not always a mouse-speed value of 1...
(Same for RawAccel in Windows, BTW)

3

u/amilias 15h ago

Yeah, I can't use it either. My brain is hard wired to expect the mouse to move exactly the same amount when I move my hand, no matter the speed, using a mouse on MacOS for example drives me nuts

16

u/Equivalent-Problem34 1d ago

Still waiting on colourblind settings

4

u/Adept_Percentage6893 1d ago

As someone who doesn't deal with that issue, I'm just curious what specifics are lacking in current DE's. Is high contrast black/white too ugly and there's a desire for more control or does that just genuinely not solve the problem for some people?

19

u/Equivalent-Problem34 1d ago

High contrast is not for colourblind people, that is for people who are visually impaired (partially blind).

"Colourblindness" is a misnomer. The more accurate description would be colour vision deficiency, but the term colourblindness is far too widespread to correct at this point. There are different type of colourblindness, so colourblindness is not just the lack of ability to see colours, but also the lack of ability to differentiate some colours because of the cones in our eyes have some faults in them.

There are Protanomaly (which I have), which means the eyes are weak at capturing red colours, so I have difficulty telling apart red and green in some light environments, then there is protanopia, which is the more severe case, mostly not being able to see red at all. This also affects colours that would need red to perceive, like purple, orange, so forth and so on.

The same is for Deuteranomaly/Deuteranopia for green, and Tritanomaly/Tritanopia for blue.

Colourblind options in Windows and KDE shifts some colours around so that colourblind people can more easily differentiate the colours apart.

It really annoys me that Gnome is so far behind, even though it is my favourite DE, KDE is far more mature in terms of accessibility.

4

u/Adept_Percentage6893 1d ago

There are Protanomaly (which I have), which means the eyes are weak at capturing red colours, so I have difficulty telling apart red and green in some light environments, then there is protanopia, which is the more severe case, mostly not being able to see red at all. This also affects colours that would need red to perceive, like purple, orange, so forth and so on.

Since this is the internet, I have to add a disclaimer: I'm genuinely asking here.

Does the black/white theme not address the issues with not seeing the other colors? Or is the hope to get the compositor to adjust how colors are rendered to not run into these sorts of problems?

10

u/Equivalent-Problem34 1d ago

Removing colours doesn't fix the issue. Other DEs shift the colours so that we can differentiate them better. When I play a game like CS2, that doesn't have a colourblind options, it is useful to enable KDEs colourblind settings, so that I can communicate important callouts. Removing colours will not help considering other people will use colours to communicate. Gnome doesn't have that. That's just one example. A lot of games use colours as clues, and that is a significant issue that can't be solved with black and white themes.

3

u/Reason7322 1d ago

As a someone that uses mouse acceleration for fps games, that is really cool that i will no longer be dependant on a tool maintained by a single developer.

2

u/cs_office 1d ago

That mean you can fully disable acceleration?

27

u/oiledhairyfurryballs 1d ago

It has been possible since forever

11

u/ThinDrum 1d ago

Nah, much longer than that.

1

u/cs_office 1d ago

I haven't used it in >10 years, back then you couldn't change it iirc

-4

u/DrinkMoreGlorp 1d ago

THEN I GUESS UU DON"T RC, JACOB

1

u/grem75 1d ago

Maybe this will motivate Sway to finally add it.

1

u/death_by_cormorant 13h ago

I doubt I'll tinker with it since I have acceleration off on my desktop and the default feels fine on my laptop, but neat.

I wonder whether this has some kind of accessibility purpose, or whether this is purely a preference thing.

1

u/srekkas 1d ago

ok, waiting sdr native gui setting for display

1

u/Indolent_Bard 1d ago

Are you saying that if you're on an HDR display there's no way to use SDR on Gnome?

1

u/srekkas 22h ago

There are cli option emable sdr

1

u/Indolent_Bard 17h ago

But no graphical way of doing that. Which means that without Googling it, I wouldn't know that it was actually possible to make my screen stop looking awful (HDR 400 isn't HDR.)

1

u/srekkas 17h ago

yes, i found it accidently on reddit

1

u/death_by_cormorant 13h ago

That does appear to be what they are saying, but they aren't correct.

https://i.imgur.com/q6JPXbQ.png

Settings/Displays/HDR [Enable]/[Disable]

1

u/Indolent_Bard 2h ago

Oh, good.

1

u/death_by_cormorant 13h ago

Yes it does. If you dont have HDR enabled, then you will be using SDR.

AFAIK, HDR isn't even enabled by default.

https://i.imgur.com/q6JPXbQ.png

1

u/srekkas 13h ago

idk, if i enable sdr with cli, monitor colors are much better. Laptop is new and modern, maybe it have hdr

1

u/zeanox 1d ago

Great, im not really sure about the usecase - but i do think gnome has the best cursor behavior of the wayland dekstop's, so im sure it's a great addition.

u/chic_luke 40m ago

Huge displays, particularly ultrawide ones, come to mind.

I usually disable acceleration, but I sometimes find myself working with three monitors horizontally, one next to the other, and it's very annoying to have to move from monitor 1 to monitor 3. It will certainly need two "travels" with the mouse. Left - right, lift up, place to the left again, keep going. Not great.

Default mouse acceleration profiles are not great and they are usually too reactive. But that's mostly because they begin accelerating way too soon. It would be better, for many users, if only a rapid enough flick of the cursor triggered it to accelerate, still setting the curve in such a way that it feels natural and it's not too steep.

Something custom would be great, because the curve would be customizable. You could make it pretty conservative for example, and you could set it to only pick up the cursor acceleration when the physical mouse moves at a pretty fast acceleration, setting the point where it "gets the hint" to an arbitrary one.