Need to increase pointer (mouse cursor) speed/acceleration

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

This bug was fixed in the package unity-system-compositor - 0.3.1+16.04.20160121.1-0ubuntu1

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unity-system-compositor (0.3.1+16.04.20160121.1-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  [ CI Train Bot ]
  * No-change rebuild.

unity-system-compositor (0.3.1+16.04.20160121-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  [ Alexandros Frantzis ]
  * Unblank the screen when a pointer or key event arrives. (LP: #1488413)

  [ Andreas Pokorny ]
  * Implement a DBus interface for setting pointer speed/acceleration.
    (LP: #1536383)

 -- Alexandros Frantzis <email address hidden> Thu, 21 Jan 2016 17:58:58 +0000

This bug was fixed in the package unity8 - 8.11+16.04.20160129-0ubuntu1

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unity8 (8.11+16.04.20160129-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  [ Albert Astals Cid ]
  * Audio Preview Button: Don't gain focus on press (LP: #1517830)
  * Better attempt at sanitization
  * Better looking application scopes for wide screens
  * Call printSettings correctly
  * Card test: Limit the precision we ask for doubles to be equal
  * Convert while into tryCompareFunction
  * Do not use the same filepath parameter for all the card creator
    createQmlObject calls (LP: #1536379)
  * Fix some test shells being unstable in the armhf builders
  * Make revealByEdgePush more stable
  * More reliable compares
  * Move the mouse over the bfb before waiting for rendering
  * Remove the DDAs constrains for every test
  * Set the background source size to the max we'll need + new
    background (LP: #1539011)

  [ Andrea Cimitan ]
  * Dynamically change click scope card size according to size (LP:
    #1536745)
  * Should fix lazyimage test failures on fast machines

  [ CI Train Bot ]
  * Fix card tests on the phone
  * Update translation template

  [ Daniel d'Andrada ]
  * Desktop stage rotates only to follow screen orientation (LP:
    #1515977)

  [ Lukáš Tinkl ]
  * Hide/reveal the mouse pointer on touch/mouse events renamed:
    plugins/Utils/HomeKeyWatcher.cpp =>
    plugins/Utils/WindowInputMonitor.cpp plugins/Utils/HomeKeyWatcher.h
    => plugins/Utils/WindowInputMonitor.h
    tests/mocks/Utils/HomeKeyWatcher.qml =>
    tests/mocks/Utils/WindowInputMonitor.qml
    tests/plugins/Utils/HomeKeyWatcherTest.cpp =>
    tests/plugins/Utils/WindowInputMonitorTest.cpp

  [ Michael Terry ]
  * Synchronize the mouse-cursor-speed and touchpad-cursor-speed
    properties with USC. (LP: #1536383)

  [ Michael Zanetti ]
  * Add InputMethod to secondary screen
  * Add a virtual Touchpad while external screen is connected
  * Make big tablets switch to windowed mode by plugging a kbd only (LP:
    #1535399)
  * Prevent alt key presses from being dispatched to the app on alt+tab
    (LP: #1532862)

  [ Michał Sawicz ]
  * Make qmluitests.sh more robust and allow parallel test execution
  * Skip SessionBackendTest::testLogin1Capabilities until we talk to a
    mock instead (LP: #1532112, #1532113)

 -- Michał Sawicz <email address hidden> Fri, 29 Jan 2016 11:53:27 +0000

BTW, we have a strong suspicion that Unity8 is only seeing 4%-50% of the actual mouse motion events. This is a Mir bug, but it's also unique to Unity8 as no other Mir shell uses nesting+relative motion together like Unity8 does.

So FYI, if that's correct then once we fix it the mouse will get MUCH faster and Unity8 will need to slow it down :)

See bug 1539009.

Please note you will need to undo the fix for this bug soon. Because a proper fix is coming in Mir 0.21.0 -> bug 1539009

For regular 125Hz mice this will double the cursor speed in Unity8. And for 1000Hz people it will provide a 20x speed-up. Just because we were missing between 50% and 94% of the relative input data :)