1y ago

I suddenly have a massive cursor with some GNOME apps. Does anybody else have this?

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/17545984

UPDATE IN COMMENTS!!

Hey there, I don't know if any of you noticed something similar recently, but I have noticed my cursors have gone HUGE, like 2x what it should be at least. I think this is related to the affected apps using a beta version of Libadwaita 1.6, but I just wanted to confirm here before I create an issue in the repo. I use 200% scaling, GNOME 45, Fedora 39. Does anybody else have this problem? Thanks!!
How it should look (in Pods, firefox and most other apps)
How it looks in Ptyxis
How it looks in Adwaita Demo (latest update, which bumped the libadwaita version to 1.6)

20 comments

Try the following:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 12
Or if that's too small, then a different value instead of 12.
Source
- I will never see mouse cursors the same. Thanks random internet person!
- I didn't really expect this thread to turn into this, but I have to say I am glad it did XD
  For the cursor-size setting, it does not seem to be the issue here, it simply makes it smaller on the normal windows, but about the normal size on the affected apps. Like the person on the GNOME community on here suggested, downgrading the GNOME platform runtime seems to be the issue, and since this only happens on nightly/bleeding edge GNOME apps, I think the issue is there. Thx though!

I swear to god I have such a massive cursor I had to get surgery so I can wear short pants in summer.

With big freedom come big cursors. Every click is a boom of libration!

Brag much

Try apt purge viagra

I've seen this happen after switching to wayland. Changing the cursor size and then changing it back solved the issue for me.
- What's weird is I've been using Wayland since I got this computer 1.5 years ago and it started doing this out of nowhere

Virtual Viagra

Was getting it on my system and this is what fixed it for me https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/firefox#KDE_integration

I had similar behaviour when testing KDE 6, so it's not just a Gnome/GTK/Libadwaita/I hate that entire project issue.
I solved it by downloading a custom cursor theme, putting it in ~/.local/share/icons and then giving each Flatpak app access to that directory (for some reason, on KDE, they didn't by default).
You may need to log-out log-in to see the changes.

I noticed this too. Cursor suddenly twice as big, with 200% scaling. But I use Hyprland, not Gnome.
- Somebody on the GNOME community version of this post suggested downgrading GNOME platform runtime

You need to turn it off in accessibility settings

I have the same issue on Kde Wayland lol

Update on this: This is an issue in Mutter, and Robert Mader has started work on a fix for GNOME 47. The issue happens due to GTK and Mutter doing scaling differently and them not being in sync (the issue only appears in Nightly)
Issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2633 Fix MR: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3859

Are these by any chance Flatpak apps? If so, do you have GTK and GNOME portals installed and up to date? I had a similar problem where this was the issue.
- Yes they are flatpaks, and I am pretty the affected ones are all nightly flatpaks. I should have the portals correctly installed since the file picker is the correct one, and I am also on fedora39 so it would surprise me if the flatpak install wasn't the full one by default.

I occasionally see a larger cursor on GNOME, but it's always been alongside larger scaling for everything. Steam in particular sometimes decides to ignore it's high DPI setting and looks like it's running on a phone screen. Firefox occasionally as well.
This must be some issue with how DPI modes are recorded and how apps are launched. Restarting the app has fixed it every time for me, so I've never looked deeper into it.

20 comments