Changing cursor renders Manjaro Gnome unusable

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1

I am new in Linux and tried to use Manjaro Gnome as my starting point. I tried to customized my desktop theme to look similar to Windows 11. Everything looks good and okay from icons to taskbar. Then I tried to install a windows 10 cursors from gnome looks. I made a folder .icons in home and put the cursors there. Then I went to Gnome Tweaks to change the settings. The cursor changed to windows 10, then everything lags and stops responding (even gls or something). I tried to reset my pc several times but to no avail. Everything is so lag, gnome tweaks and even the terminal is not working anymore. I have to resort reinstalling Manjaro. I don’t know why this happened but probably because I put it on the wrong folder.

2

Before you re-install, please try this because you have an issue in your user profile and finding out which exact setting you changed is going to take weeks if not months, therefore, we’re going to do the following:

  • If you get lost, please remember Ctrl+Alt+F1 is your friend!

  • Print this page so you have it as a reference while in TTY2

  • Log off from the GUI

  • Switch to TTY2 by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2

  • Log in there

  • Execute:

    sudo adduser RGG2

    (If your local user name is the same as your user name here, otherwise substitute)

  • Verify that the new user has access to the same groups as your old one by executing groups and comparing the output of both users.

    groups RGG
groups RGG2

    (Where obviously, RGG is your old user and RGG2 is your new one.)
    E.G. if RGG is a member of operator and RGG2 isn’t, execute:

    usermod --append --groups operator RGG2

  • Copy all data files from your old profile into your new one

    cp --verbose --recursive --preserve=timestamps /home/RGG/Documents/* /home/RGG2/Documents/

    If that worked and you had no errors, remove the documents from your old user:

    rm --recursive /home/RGG/Documents/*

    repeat for:

    • Pictures
    • Videos
    • Music
    • .thunderbird
    • .mozilla/firefox/
    • Templates, and everything else that is important to you.
    • Linux games like Battle of Wesnoth have their game data stored under ~/.local/share/ E.G. ~/.local/share/wesnoth/

  • After everything has been copied over, disable the old user so you cannot accidentally log on to it any more:

    usermod --lock RGG

  • If you would have theming or other customisations going on, don’t do everything in one day but do this at the rate of 1 application / theme / … per day and if the same issue crops up again, roll back your last change and thus you’ve now pinpointed the exact setting that made your old user misbehave. :thinking:

  • in 1 month delete the entire home directory of your old user, but don’t delete the user itself so that in 6 months time files still owned by that user will still show up under its username.

  • If you ever migrate to a new machine, just don’t migrate the old user: only the new one.

  • From now on, start making backups so you can roll back and never have to do this again:

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