I first noticed this in OpenBSD. When I first installed it, I had to use the console quite a lot and I noticed that the mouse seemed to be dropped and reattached constantly. I checked the plug and pushed it in hard but that didn't cure the annoyance. Then I noticed that once I was in X, the problem stopped. If I switched out to a console, it started again.

Naturally I thought this was just a BSD thing but I've just installed Bodhi and their kernel does exactly the same thing. Needless to say, I've never had this problem in Slackware!

I know that X has its own mouse driver (in Linux it's evdev) but the usb port itself is controlled by the kernel even in X, so I don't see how any purely physical problem there could be console-specific.

It's not really a problem but I would like an explanation all the same.

I've had this happen on some OS's, but once away from the first console, (VC1), it all settles down, I just live with it.

You've just said in one sentence what took me four paragraphs! I'm quite prepared to "live with it". After all, how often does one use a virtual console nowadays? But I want to know what causes it all the same.

btw, it's not just on console 1. You notice it more there because you see all the system console messages, but any virtual console behaves the same way.

I know that we, and yourself included, intuitively know that this is not the best idea ... but yet some high percentage of us might do precisely that.

Uhm ... not enough information? (And perhaps it doesn't matter, because you've settled and are not overly concerned.)

I mean, why is your mouse special? I realize a USB HID should be "the same". But my point here is for all of your Linux distribution, your PC, and the mouse. What models/versions/etc are they all? Because you may have an extremely old PC, maybe it only supports USB1.1, and maybe certain Linux distributions "support" it, but there are problems that aren't entirely fixed. Maybe your mouse is "special".

This week, I visited someone's desk and they had a "trackball mouse", I know people use them, but you don't see those much these days.

And then, during a meeting, someone had a moderately, old school, wired USB optical mouse, picture attached. I know you can buy those now, but this was a very old Microsoft, I know I've seen them for about 15 years. And given that the former off-white was yellowed, it obviously was old.

Upon my comment, "nice mouse", I got three people joking loudly, "Oh, he's got 2 or 3 dozen of those at his house!"

So you know I couldn't resist, and I joked, "Got a bunch of XT keyboards at home too?!?"

Their answer was delivered deadpan, matter of fact, "Not anymore, I had to finally give up on them because I just could not contend further with the Type-1 conversion to PS/2 and then to USB, plus all the cables and connectors were dying on me. But I did redo the wiring harness on one of them to full USB and got it to work. Best damn keyboard ever though."

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Sorry, but what's wrong with that? When I was at work and anything went wrong with a computer, the first thing you were told to do (before you phoned the IT department) was to push all the plugs in firmly.
It's special, all right! It actually came with the computer, along with a usb keyboard. The whole machine cost £84 and they threw in the peripherals for free. But I replaced the keyboard with an old ps2 Logitech because I was short of usb sockets, and also because the Lenovo keyboard has function keys that are difficult to use. The machine (a Lenovo Thinkstation) is old, but not spectacularly so. It has both usb2 and usb3 ports and uses the xhci driver module.

I've noticed that neither the mouse nor the keyboard work in rEFInd, so maybe there is something unusual about them.

Sorry I was envisioning excessive force as opposed with controlled firmness.