Mouse is flickering on state change

Hey everyone, eversince i switched to linux i came over a lot of things that needed tweaking and most of them i was able to fix on my own or with google, but one! When my mouse cursor changes state there is a little hardly noticable but in slightly annoying flickering. I found a few threads discussing this but no solution. Especially this thread contains a video of the behavior: Cursor flickering/jerks when changing states
I use a different mouse theme than the guy in the video…

Now what makes it so hard for me to tackle this problem is that it persists throughout
different distros (Arch, popOS, manjaro and mxLinux),
different DEs (KDE, Gnome and xfce),
nvidia and nouveau dirver,
X11 and Wayland,
different physical mouse,
different monitors and different cursor themes.
I tried to force composition pipeline in nvidia settings but it hardly makes a differce.
I really dont know what else i should try…

I daily use manjaro kde with proprietary drivers, and have a nVidia GTX1060 6Gb.
I really would like to give Wayland a try but since there the problem seams to be way stronger than in X11 with nvidia drivers i`d like to fix this first!

Please help me and let me now for additional needed info!
greetings Ben

1 Like

Hi there and thanks for linking to my thread! Very recently, it was reported in the KDE bug tracker, and the developers determined that it is an issue on the DRM side. So, unfortunately, there isn’t much you can do at this point until that is fixed. However, if the flickering is bothering you too much and you don’t mind how your cursor looks, I suggest to change your cursor theme to KDE Classic for the time being. I find my cursor to jerk/flicker less with that cursor theme applied.

By the way, I currently use an AMD card because it runs better on Linux thanks to officially-supported open-source drivers, but when I started using Manjaro I had the same exact GPU as you.

thanks for the quick reply! I have indeed noticed that the default cursor theme works better but i honestly dont think that i would like to comprise the clean look of the breeze cursors …
The problem isnt too bad but bothering anyway. I find it strange that there are not more reports for this when it is such a fundamental bug as you say… Do you still have the same problem on your amd gpu??

Hopefully this gets fixed soon

Yes, the cursor flickering bug also occurs on AMD graphics just like with Nvidia. In fact, I have both a desktop and laptop with AMD graphics, and the bug shows up very well in both of them.

Speaking of AMD, the KDE developer in the linked comment opened an issue regarding this exact same behavior at freedesktop.org. Further discussion about this issue will go in that bug ticket.