I switched from a Macbook air to Ubuntu on a Thinkpad this fall, and mouse/scroll settings were by far the most frustrating part of the transition. I ended up with a script I run every time I boot up my machine:

https://github.com/artursapek/dotfiles/blob/master/prefs.sh

It's nice that xinput exists for low-level tweaks, but it seemed necessary because the GUI is so lacking. I still don't think I completely understand what settings I'm changing, but everything feels normal now.

The trackpad scrolling still doesn't feel nearly as good as on a mac, but I've gotten used to it.

I think you should be able to put those settings into your X11 configuration so you don't have to re-configure every time you boot, unless xinput on Ubuntu is different from Arch: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Libinput#Common_options (Although debugging xorg config files is not a terribly fun exercise :/)

I fully agree with the post above me. This is so annoying. Why is acceleration default and why isn't there a setting for it?

This is also something that may scare away casual users such as gamers, where acceleration is not acceptable.

Mouse scroll/wheel acceleration is also sth which gives a very natural feeling on osx but which is missing in Linux. Together with that, pixel-based scrolling, not line based.

On windows I can chance the scroll speed so its one line per tick, on ubuntu its stuck at 3 lines per tick. I have a logitech 'spinny wheel' and this makes it very frustrating as the screen zooms by and I lose precision.

I agree wholeheartedly!

The default mouse settings are unusable, and it is impossible to get it good, but with a lot of fiddling it's almost possible to get rid of the weird acceleration.

Sensible defaults for mouse: fixed scaling (downscaling) without smoothing.

Sensible defaults for pad: fixed scaling (or minimal acceleration) with some minimal smoothing.

For future reference for people suffering from this issue, the most reliable solution I found so far is to add the following lines to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-mouse.conf

  Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "mouse"
    MatchIsPointer "on"
    Option "AccelerationProfile" "-1"
    Option "AccelerationScheme" "none"
  EndSection

+1. It made me quit Ubuntu, along with another bug (Ethernet authentication).

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- ROLE: Java developer, now founder

I just saw your comment after posting a fairly similar one myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14005808

Last time I was using Ubuntu consistently I was shocked by this deficiency +1

A thousand times this.

+1 was about to post the same thing

+1