Jack up the sensitivity to maximum and it works pretty well. I don't need to carry a mouse with me when I'm traveling because the nub is so much better.
To add to that, on Xfce at least it’s not enough to adapt the graphical mouse settings but one also needs to manually set (e.g.) /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio1/serio2/sensitivity to a larger value (I use 220) for a suitably fast mouse.