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Is there really no way to change the scroll wheel speed on an usb attached mouse in ubuntu? (Not to be confused with touchpad, which does have a setting)

I've gone every thread related to this issue on the Ubuntu forums. The consensus seems to be that there is no solution. How is that possible? It can't be!

I thought you were supposed to write your own drivers, when you need a function, such as this…

How does Windows handle this? Scroll wheels are actually digital, so I don't think there's an easy way to adjust their sensitivity with a driver (a scroll wheel click event is a scroll wheel click event). At the very least, it seems like you would need each application to support changing the amount scrolled with each scroll wheel click. Does Windows have some global setting that applications are expected to respect?

Yes. you can change the number of lines scrolled by the wheel.

probably the same for OSX. The benefits of having a unified event system.

Right, but how is this implemented? If I'm Firefox and receive a scroll click event, how do I know how many lines to scroll by? Do I have to read a registry setting, or is it built into the event itself?

Funny that you mention firefox. I think firefox has a plugin for this problem, letting you set your wheel scroll lines. Of course, it's just for that application.

Firefox by default it just picks up the scroll value from the system if one exists (windows defaults to 2 lines) or it can optionally use its own override for scroll clicks (about:config, filter by "wheel", relevant settings are probably mousewheel.withnokey.numlines <value> and to set mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to false). Although there is probably a plugin or a dozen that let you control this behavior with an easier gui.

Some googling turns up that KDE has such a setting that presumably well-behaved KDE applications would respect, but it doesn't seem like gnome does.