Rainbow rotating circle appears randomly next to mouse pointer?

Occasionally, without any warning, the system will start displaying a small rainbow coloured rotating circle next to the mouse cursor.

It sometimes runs for about 5 or more minutes.

Is this normal behaviour for Manjaro Linux? Or is it something to dig into and research further?

Thanks

It’s the waiting/pending cursor animation depending of your theme I guess?

Not sure? I am using whatever theme the Manjaro XFCE version installed.

I never tried XFCE more than 5 minutes, so I don’t know for sure which cursor theme is by default.

Here is an example of cursors with rainbow colors:

If you don’t like the default, you can change your cursor themes.

And if it’s well the waiting/pending wheel you’re talking about, it’s due to the system waiting for an heavy application/task to finish, such as Gimp or a browser opening by ex.

Yep - it is normal - as in when launching a program from the application menu. It could be triggered at login by an autostarted application.

It is called launch feedback and is defined in the launcher file for the program - and those settings are defined by the development team for that application.

The purpose is to indicate to the user the applicable application has been launched but some waiting till fully initialized and open are to be expected.

Yes I get that, but this circle stays on until well after the app has been closed…in fact on occasion I need to re-boot to get rid of.

That - indeed - is strange.

First thing to do is to reset the cursor theme - change to something else - save the change - then switch back and save the change.

If this does not fix the behavior - then there is a background process sending the launch feedback.

Check with the session section of the xfce settings control panel.

It could be one of those apps which runs on a schedule and the .desktop file contains the instruction so show lauch feedback - but I really have no idea what it is - as I am not an xfce desktop user.

For the few tests I have done on xfce - I have never seen the behavior on a default install.

I have the thought that this may actually be a kind of xy problem so I suggest traceback your steps with the system until before the issue appeared - it may be an app you have installed either official repo or using AUR build script or another change you made to the system.

If maybe a chromium based browser running in the background - talking to a website - it can really be a lot of things - but with the sparse info - the only thing we can do is speculate - and speculation very rarely lead to a solution.

Yes sorry for the sparse info - still a bit new to all of this stuff. This thing doesn’t happen often and is seemingly random, whihc makes it even harder to track down. Everything I install I do via Pacman and not terminal.
I’ll check in XFCE settings next time I notice it.
Thanks

I think if a process crashes it can fail to turn off the ‘waiting’ mouse animation. A process could also crash when closing.