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Comment by j1elo | Hacker News Reader

Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays?

I'm flabbergasted that this is a question that should even be asked. Linux Desktop is so advanced and at the same time so lacking in stupidly simple matters such as this one, but here we are, look at how complex the answer marked as solution looks here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/285689/increase-mouse-wheel-...

(hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider")

I've been in love with Linux Mint's Cinnamon and the very good balance between functionality and out-of-the-box experience. But no, the system settings don't allow to change the scroll speed. I won't complain, but it does confuse me...

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> Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays?

Unfortunately KDE has gone full stupid in this regard. From the numerous bug reports, I think they decided that you can't please everyone so they should please nobody. Scroll speed is not deterministic to humans, who are not calculators. The intuitive thing is to scroll a consistent a amount per wheel tick. They used to do this but now it's a percentage of the content so sometimes it scrolls 14 lines and sometimes it scrolls 8.

I guess the behavior is different in Wayland because "x11 is dead" therefore only breaking changes make it into the x11 version. Some day they'll make the x11 version suck as bad as Wayland and then people will make the right choice. /s I'd be a bit less salty if I wasn't being asked to chose between two different sets of broken. I need LibreOffice to work so I'm using x11.

What are the problems with Wayland and libreoffice?

Clicking a button from the tool bar that shows a popup of some type (e.g. color chooser) doesn't display the popup. I'm not asking for an exotic behavior. No it's not NVIDIA's fault because I have no such hardware.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=144585

Fixed versions from bug's whiteboard field: target:7.2.2 target:7.4.0 target:7.3.3

> I think they decided that you can't please everyone so they should please nobody

This line made me laugh! Unfortunately I do agree that that seems to be the case here also.

> They used to do this but now it's a percentage of the content so sometimes it scrolls 14 lines and sometimes it scrolls 8.

What in the hell..

... yeah, what? If the content is really, really long, is it possible to scroll the mouse wheel one click and have it skip part of the content because "1%" (or whatever increment it is) is longer than what fits on the screen?

> Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays?

> (hint: the reasonable expectation, IMHO, would be to "open System Settings, go to Mouse Settings, and change a slider")

Yes. This is more or less what KDE does everywhere the upstream software stack supports it, and probably also what it already did the last time you tried it. This comes down to your distro's display server configuration.

On Xorg, mouse scroll speed is up to your X11 input driver, not your desktop environment. If the X11 input driver you're using for your mouse supports setting the scroll speed, that setting shows up in System Settings in your Plasma session. Libinput doesn't support this feature, so if you're on Xorg and you want it, don't use libinput as your mouse driver.

Under Wayland (which also uses libinput), the compositor mediates all input and so the KDE folks have worked around the issue and implemented the feature themselves.

See the upstream issue in libinput here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput/-/issues/74...

At least in XFCE, that "reasonable expectation" has been fulfilled for as long as I can remember.

In KDE, I have no idea, because the last KDE that I have used was 3.5, which was the best desktop environment that I have ever used, including in comparison any Windows or MacOS version (while KDE 4.0 was the worst).

You should give Plasma a try some time! It's mature and feature-rich again, like KDE was in the 3.5 days.

(not the GP)

I tried it again last year some time and it was neither as configurable nor as stable as 3.5. Granted, maybe it's just rose-coloured glasses, but Trinity DE still seems to provide a better experience for me to this day.

> Can the mouse scroll speed be configured in KDE, nowadays?

If you use Wayland the answer is Yes. There's a "Scrolling speed" configuration in the Mouse settings.

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