Irritating mouse cursor shift after update

[suplero]

Hi,

Did an update to the latest everything on kubuntu22.04 a day or two ago, and now after a powerdown and reboot, the mouse cursor changes to the 48 size and gray with a right click or a long left click.

Under cursors in the settings I adjusted the cursor set to be 24 size, rather than the auto size or the larger 36 or 48 sizes. Even though I have a 4k monitor, I do not want to have the cursor resize like that. All was well until this last update - and now the cursor resizes on different mouse clicks, which is just annoying to see.

After going into settings and changing and reapplying the 24 size cursor set, it works perfectly - until the next reboot. I have no idea what is happening upon reboot, but the auto size cursor for the high res monitors seems to apply itself every time.

Any way to take this behavior out and make the cursor stay at 24 size without having to reset the settings every time?

thanks

[suplero]

Multiple updates and still has the same behavior.

Booting into kubuntu has the cursor set for "finding" mode or whatever whenever a right click happens in a window.

When I apply different settings - typically change the cursor from the booted 24 to 48, apply, then change back to 24, and reapply, then the "finding" mode no longer tries to take over.

Seems like a case of "programmers know better than users" of how to use their system... Still irritating to have to change the settings every single day to make it behave as I want.

How about a check box for "use finder size cursors for 4k displays?" or something?

Irritating

[Schwarzer Kater]

Did you erase the user cache files after the update (upgrade?)?

cd
sudo rm -r .cache/*

Log out and log in again.

Test mouse cursor behavior.

[claydoh]

What do you mean by 'auto size' or 'finding' ? There isn't such an option in Plasma.

Seems like a case of "programmers know better than users" of how to use their system.

Nah, you are jumping the gun a wee bit here. You have found some sort of bug, somewhere.
Also, if this were the case, there would have been thousands of people hollering if/when this sort of 'change' happened in the rolling distros, like Arch and neon, many months ago -- and it definitely has not been seen there.

Do you have multiple desktop environments installed, perhaps? Sometimes these are both loading their settings and system services when logging in, depending on how that DE was installed.I have seen and heard of similar oddities when having multiple desktops, particularly a full Ubuntu desktop installed alongside Kubuntu (and vice versa. This would be my initial guess, from a very quick glance.

Another possibility, though highly unlikely from your description, is that Snap and iirc Flatpak applications by their nature use only a limited number of self-contained cursor styles, so using a custom cursor style on your desktop might not get used in those applications, Again, not likely here at all, as you would definitely notice your normal cursor change when using a Snap based application.

the mouse cursor changes to the 48 size and gray

A screenshot of the different cursors might be handy , especially if that grey cursor doesn't look like any of your currently installed KDE ones, maybe we can tell which one it is.

[suplero]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies.

It might be a bug - but it feels random to how it shows up

For example, I installed firefox and thunderbird from the deb packages using the alternate repository, rather than using the snap packages. And firefox and thunderbird both change the cursor on a right click - pic of firefox.

I also use dayjournal as a note taking tool, and that is a very old deb package - which also shows up, pic attached.

Then I thought these "non-standard" kubuntu installs might have an issue with the cursor properties - and started looking around for other programs that show identical behavior.

Libre office, and dolphin are fine, along with konsole - which started to convince me more

But gimp and synaptic also exhibit the large gray cursor on a right click - and I would consider those standard packages maybe?

Kicad also is installed direct from the kicad repository, and that has the same large gray cursor.

I have no idea how to categorize which packages are "official" and which are not, but I would guess that the kde developed packages fare better than those installed from the multiverse respositories.

What is the danger of clearing the .cache folder? Does it repopulate on boot?

One of my gripes with this - aside from trying to debug which packages have this problem - is that somehow the update changed the behavior, which is fine, i can expect that there are some small overwrites of properties on an update, but when I set the behavior myself, those changes should overwrite anything that was set before, right?

Why do I have to set the cursor behavior every reboot? I have rebooted at least 60 times since the initial post, and not once has the cursor behavior been in my favor... that is unacceptable to me. Of course, if this is a bug, because kubuntu is "transitioning" to snaps and other environments and doesn't really care about the non-snap behaviors, then that is another topic for discussion.

The fact that 22.04 is a long term support release, and this behavior happened at 6 months after release doesn't give great confidence for a stable system going forward for the next 2 to 4 years.

This is my first time running dual 4k monitors, although the setup was detected at install. The cursor behavior is fine on my dual monitor 1080p installs - as expected, because smaller resolutions typically keep track of the cursor easier.

[suplero]

For clarity, here are both cursors in firefox side by side

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
What is the danger of clearing the .cache folder? Does it repopulate on boot?
[…]

No danger in $HOME (as one of the KDE developers once wrote, but I don't have the link anymore…), and it is repopulated on boot and by the individual programs when you start them.

But "4K monitor" could be the right thought to find the bug…

[claydoh]

Another test would be to create a new user account and see if the same behavior exists. This might narrow it down to user configs, or eliminate this as a place to look.

It might be a bug - but it feels random to how it shows up

This is sort of a perfect example of a bug, albeit one that might be hard to trace, if very few , if any, are seeing similar things.
I have not yet found any similar reports to this problem, though I have not gone down the well very deeply.


I wonder if video driver being used might have any effect on this?

[Snowhog]

Not asked yet (I don't think?), but what Plasma Style are you using, and what Cursors are you using?

[suplero]

Thanks for the replies again.

I might do a clean install at some point when I have downtime.

I believe I am using the basic intel drivers, as I have the UHD630 graphics set.

I installed the glaze plasma style, and the global theme is the standard breeze.

the cursors in use are the breeze light, although i have selected and installed a few other cursor sets - the behavior stays the same on startup, the right click gives that odd cursor apart from the selected cursor style.

The first six months after install was fine too, only after that update in November - maybe 22.04.1? - did this behavior appear. I have no idea how to track what happened in that update to make the cursor change.

[claydoh]

I might do a clean install at some point when I have downtime.

A fresh user account might help prevent that, if things work properly there. 'nuking' your home directory and re-adding system config files from backups, if desired, Might be less time consuming,

[suplero]

I guess I have options to think about and maybe work through slowly

clearing the .cache directory didn't do anything for the next reboot - maybe the following reboot will have a different result?

Then when i get time, I can wipe the home directory and see what that offers, and maybe reinstall.

I can try adding a different user to see how the behavior is from a fresh home directory too.

thanks

[suplero]

Quick test of new user

The default cursor set is the "breeze" darkish cursors, and when using that set, everything went totally fine size wise with a new user. Right clicks had no change in size.

Changing the cursor set to "breeze light" caused the cursor to change to the large gray size on a right click on the second log in with a right click, just as before.

I figured that if the right click bug uses the breeze dark icons as default, deleting the set would prevent the behavior - but without being able to delete it in the settings, that theory can't really be tested.