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I upgraded from ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, and disabled Wayland and enabled the Xorg display. I use the xfce desktop on a Lenovo T430s. After a few seconds of inactivity, my Logitech USB mouse is unresponsive until I move it around for a couple of seconds and/or depress a button or the center wheel. The problem is "fixed" by unplugging and re-plugging in the USB dongle ... until the next reboot.

  • The problem does not happen with the default ubuntu desktop.
  • The problem does not depend on which USB port the dongle is plugged in to.
  • The same behavior occurs for two different Logitech mouse/dongle pairs.
  • I never had this issue using xfce with ubuntu 16.04.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

John Doe
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  • I am spitballing here because I am not 100% sure what your issue is. I use Xfce4 and I won't go to any other DE. Maybe use Compton http://duncanlock.net/blog/2013/06/07/how-to-switch-to-compton-for-beautiful-tear-free-compositing-in-xfce/ instead of xfwm4 as the compositor. In the instructions, just install compton without adding any repositories sudo apt install compton but the rest of the instructions are still valid. – Terrance May 09 '18 at 00:39

1 Answers1

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I finally figured out the problem, which is not likely to affect anyone else in the universe, but here's the solution anyway. As part of an autostart script for Xfce, I was using powertop to make power-saving adjustments (powertop --auto-tune). This included power management for the USB Logitech receiver, which caused the USB mouse to fall asleep after a few seconds of inactivity.

I replaced my powertop command with an excellent script (https://askubuntu.com/a/1026527/824514) that autotunes powertop but subsequently disables power management for USB devices using the Human Interface Device driver.

I don't know why I didn't have this problem in ubuntu 16.04, nor do I care to think about it.

Thanks to Ric Klaren for the script, and to Chris Pavlovich at Oregon State University for helping me identify the problem.

John Doe
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