One of the places that macOS has always excelled, all the way back to classic Mac OS.

Even System 1 on almost infinitely less powerful gear 40+ years ago super-prioritized cursor responsiveness, outshining all competitors. The OS and UI underpinnings are now 100% different, but the priority remains.

Most of this is offset by the godawful mouse acceleration profile MacOS uses by default. Many external mice, even with the sensitivity turned up to max, will not respond to small wrist movements at all and instead require disabled acceleration curves or more exaggerated mouse movements.

Those curves work fine for the Magic Trackpad, but they should not come default for any desktop Macs that use mice as their primary input.

Yeah, I'm baffled this is so bad. Especially in Linux. Surely moving the mouse should take precedence over everything else? Even highlighting the thing you move the mouse over shouldn't slow down the mouse cursor itself.

I recently had a problem with extreme mouse slowdowns on KDE/Plasma 6 on X11 with NVidia. I noticed the slowdown was particularly extreme over the tabs of my browser.

The fix, in case anyone else also has this problem, is to disable OpenGL flipping. I have no idea what OpenGL flipping does, but disabling it (in nvidia-settings and in /etc/X11/xorg.conf) fixed the problem.

I'd love it if someone could explain why. Or why this isn't the default.

OpenGL flipping is iirc the weird name nvidia gives for vsync. Disabling it means you're going to have tearing artifacts, hence why it's not the default.

But why does it slow down the mouse? Is there no way to get both? Maybe I should try if Wayland gets me both, although at the moment it just gives me a black screen.