Mouse speed

User Support General
1

I have a bit of a problem. I recently got rid of a laser mouse and while that worked ok. I went retro for a couple different reasons I won’t bore you with the details. However I ended up with an old IBM mouse that has a pointing stick or track point depending on whom you ask. This fills the role of a scroll wheel. An i am really happy with it except. The track point is way to fast. it jumps like a whole page in seconds. Its just to much there has to be a way to fix this I am experimenting with Xfce options in terminal and man pages etc but so far no luck. Any help.

Its also seems to be making the screen that is selected a problem. like literally the second I hover over a new window it gets activated again i just think the nub is too damn sensitive I just need to know how to turn it down.

2

Have you had the same experience on other OSes?

3

Actaully a little help from claude and I got there. let me post the solution.

Fixing IBM/Lenovo ScrollPoint “nub” over-scrolling in Qubes OS

Symptom: A retro ScrollPoint mouse (pressure-sensitive scroll nub instead of a wheel)
scrolls WAY too far per touch, in every app. The nub fires a burst of scroll events,
and libinput has no built-in mouse scroll-speed setting — so it feels uncontrollable.

Tested on: Qubes OS (R4.x), Fedora dom0, X11/libinput. Mouse = IBM ScrollPoint, USB 04b3:3100
(also applies to 04b3:3103 / 3105 / 3108 / 3109).

The Qubes gotchas (why generic guides fail)

  1. The fix goes in dom0, not your USB qube. Whether USB is in sys-usb or sys-net,
    the input-proxy forwards raw events to dom0 — config in the USB qube does nothing.
  2. The USB IDs are masked. In dom0 the device shows up named like sys-net: HID 04b3:3100
    but with Vendor=ffff Product=ffff. So hwdb rules that match 04b3:3100 will NOT match.
    Match by device NAME instead.
  3. libinput has no scroll-speed knob (by design). The trick is to put this one mouse
    on the older evdev driver, which DOES expose a scroll-distance setting.

Step 1 — Find your device’s name (in dom0)

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

Look for your mouse’s N: Name="..." line, e.g. sys-net: HID 04b3:3100.
You’ll match on a unique chunk of that name (here: HID 04b3:3100).

Step 2 — Make sure the evdev driver is present (in dom0)

rpm -q xorg-x11-drv-evdev

If it says “not installed”: sudo qubes-dom0-update xorg-x11-drv-evdev
(dom0 uses qubes-dom0-update, NOT apt/dnf directly.)

Step 3 — Create the config (in dom0)

sudo mkdir -p /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-scrollpoint.conf

Contents (indentation doesn’t matter; match the name from Step 1):

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "ScrollPoint"
    MatchProduct "HID 04b3:3100"
    Driver "evdev"
    Option "VertScrollDelta" "8"
    Option "HorizScrollDelta" "8"
EndSection

Save in nano: Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X.

Step 4 — Reboot

sudo reboot

(xorg config only loads when X starts.)

Tuning

  • Higher number = scrolls LESS. Start at 8; try 4–12 to taste.
  • Quick edit (the search number must match what’s in the file NOW):
    sudo sed -i 's/"8"/"10"/g' /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-scrollpoint.conf
    then sudo reboot.
  • Undo completely: sudo rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-scrollpoint.conf then sudo reboot.

Notes

  • Persistent across reboots (dom0 is persistent).
  • Keyboard keeps working if anything goes sideways, so you can always revert.
  • Pure config — no kernel modules, no daemons.
1 Like