Bug 226264

Summary:	Mouse cursor often changes size spontaneously
Product:	[I don't know] kde	Reporter:	Erik Logtenberg <erik>
Component:	general	Assignee:	Unassigned bugs mailing-list <unassigned-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE
Severity:	normal	CC:	battaglia01, henrik.pauli, hoshiyamazaki01, jplx256, kde, kzhou97, nate, sebastien.guerin.news
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Fedora RPMs
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Erik Logtenberg 2010-02-11 10:12:23 UTC

Version: (using KDE 4.3.5)
OS: Linux
Installed from: Fedora RPMs

Description of problem:

The mouse cursor spontaneously changes size from the relatively small
Bluecurve-mousecursor to around twice as big. When hovering around, the mouse
cursor then is "big" when above windows started after the size-increase, but
remains "normal" when above windows that were already there.

Then I go to the Mouse settings in the KDE System Settings, I choose a
different cursor, apply, and then change back to Bluecurve, apply. This causes
the mouse cursor to be "normal" again, above every window. Well, for some time
at least.

Because after some time, sometimes a few hours, sometimes a couple of minutes,
it'll start over again.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

It's Fedora 12 on x86_64. I'm running several Fedora-boxes and I notice that
this issue is only affecting the workstation with a 30" monitor (2560x1600@60Hz
on a DELL 3008WFP), so maybe the screen resolution has something to do with it.
I noticed that during the boot process there is also initially a bigger mouse
cursor, but during some flickering the mouse changes to normal, before the
login screen.

I have an nVidia GPU, and I'm using Noveau.
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Device 0659 (rev a1)

How reproducible:

Well I'm not sure. On my workstation it's just "use the computer" and it'll
happen at random intervals. On any other Fedora 12 box I haven't seen this
issue.
It happens especially whenever I start a new application, for instance I open konqueror. The cursor will then be big when hovering over konqueror, but stay little when hovering over other applications.

Additional information:

I found this bug that might be related: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196555
Also I filed this bug at Fedora: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=558272 but they told me to file the bug here instead.

Comment 1 Erik Logtenberg 2010-04-07 09:57:04 UTC

I noticed that the mouse cursor doesn't randomly increase size, it happens every time a new process gets started. The new process will then have the big mouse cursor associated with it, while the already running processes will have the normal one.
When I do the trick with the KDE System Settings to reset the mouse cursor, then the new process will also have the normal mouse cursor. However each new process that I start will first have the big one.

I was thinking, maybe there are more than one locations where KDE stores the selected mouse cursor theme, for instance a system-wide config, a per-user config or even a per-application config. Maybe one of them is wrong, and the others don't get loaded when a new application starts. Does anyone know exactly where KDE stores these kinds of settings?

Is there any other information that I can provide?

Comment 2 Henrik Pauli 2010-07-27 20:49:35 UTC

I noticed this happens when I have multiple monitors.  The mouse becomes bigger in applications started after the external monitor becomes attached.  Maybe it’s something related to DPI calculation? (and uses the common pixel size but the real internal screen inch size and gets a bad result?)

Comment 3 Ted Drake 2011-09-20 19:22:49 UTC

I see this same problem on a quad monitor setup with KDE 4.6.5.  My cursor turns gigantic.  Seemingly randomly.  Going into mouse cursor settings and changing the theme back and forth makes it go back to normal for a few hours.

Comment 4 Erik Logtenberg 2011-09-21 17:08:53 UTC

I still have this issue too. In the mean time I upgraded from Fedora 12 to 13 and now 14, with KDE 4.6.5 but still no change for this mouse cursor thing...

Even the status of this bug hasn't changed, it's still "unconfirmed".. :|

Comment 5 Ted Drake 2011-10-12 18:42:57 UTC

As a note to my future self and anyone else that is annoyed with this bug.  Edit ~/.kde/share/config/startupconfig and add the following line:

kcminputrc_mouse_cursorsize="20"

and this problem magically goes away.

Comment 6 kzhou97 2017-02-09 15:38:37 UTC

Another way to resolve this issue is to go to cursor theme and change it to a fixed size rather than resolution dependent. Seems to be a bug on HiDPi

Comment 7 battaglia01 2018-06-12 16:35:02 UTC

I have the same problem, but in reverse. I'm on a HiDPI screen w/ scaling set to 2.0, and every so often the mouse will revert to being scaled 1.0 in size. If I change the cursor during the current session, it will also sometimes revert to the smaller cursor size. This is on the latest Neon (based on Trusty) running Plasma 5.12, and also on Kubuntu 18.04 running Plasma 5.12.

Sometimes it will mysteriously happen if I mouse over certain regions, such as titlebars and etc. Could be a caching issue, not sure.

Comment 8 hoshiyamazaki01 2018-07-24 22:21:37 UTC

I have bad scaling inside firefox browser if I will set relative scaling, it goes small, so for me it's bug in HiDPI.

Comment 9 battaglia01 2018-07-24 22:37:44 UTC

Confirmed that changing from "resolution dependent" to "fixed size" does the trick.

Comment 10 Jan Przybylak 2018-11-28 12:49:14 UTC

I'm also experiencing this problem. However, I am unable to solve it by setting a fixed cursor size because the setting isn't saved, it's always reset after restarting system settings (Yes, I did click the apply button).
I'm using 2 monitors with different resolutions (laptop and external).

Comment 11 Nate Graham 2020-09-09 03:48:36 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 413783 ***