MICE
Upgrade it: Get more from your mouse
Look after your digits and treat them with a hand-picked mouse selected by Saeed Wazir and Neil Mohr.
If you’re a gaming type, a high-sensitivity sensor will be at the top of your list.
OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr remembers the days of carpal tunnel syndrome and the claw of death!
There are really three parts to picking (and using) a mouse for a computer system: the mouse itself, the software it uses, and the settings. Of course, as this is Linux, the software side is more complicated, but that’s what makes it fun. Picking the hardware side of the mouse isn’t that difficult – we’ll cover the options you should keep an eye out for later, and there’s a huge range out there, with some eye-watering prices. The issue (as we saw with keyboards) is that the customisation software that many manufacturers tout is only available on Windows and Mac OS, which seems a worse situation than with keyboards. This means that any fancy RGB lighting or custom buttons may not be as readily available to Linux users. Thankfully, however, due to the general plug and play Human Interface Devices driver, the basic functions work without issue.
Hopefully, you’re already aware of the default Gnome or KDE settings available with your existing desktop. Under Ubuntu, that amounts to the barest of controls for your two mouse buttons and the scroll wheel. To be fair, KDE isn’t much better, just offering a middle mouse button alternative mode. With a lack of third-party software from manufacturers, if you want to do anything fancy or take advantage of additional buttons, you need to configure that yourself – see the boxout (opposite page) for solutions. We will say that while OpenRGB offers lighting control for a range of mice, it doesn’t extend to button or wider input controls. As far as we understand.