How to fix mouse cursor flickering or disappearing?

We may encounter mouse flickering or disappearing issue, here are the possible causes and solutions:

Possible cause 1:

Screen settings: resolution and refresh rate. Can be checked (On KDE) under systemsettings5 then display and monitor

Possible cause 2:

Screen compositor: it could be caused by the sale-method/rendering-backend/tearing-prevention those settings can be changed (On KDE) under systemsettings5, display and monitor then compositor… apply new settings and compare

Possible cause 3:

Display server mis-configuration: you can regenerate the display server config file with X -configure or similar but first make a copy of /etc/X11

Possible cause 4:

System failure, crash, reboot: on system failure especially for systems equipped with SSD you may loose important files; Files under directories like /home/user/, /etc/ or /usr/ can cause serious damages, as these directories contain important settings/packages files for different aspect of the desktop. usually when a file is lost after a crash, the file may be completely deleted or zeroed, you can then search for file with zero size and check out if important file are corrupted with the command find /etc -size 0 -print (this is for /etc) you can also check packages integrity for missing/modified file, on rpm based system it’s done with the command rpm -Va you would then reinstall the broken package.

A common situation in this case is loosing the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf or one of the config file under /etc/X11/ responsible for the display server; If recovering the file is not possible the config can be regenerated with X -configure or similar command

Possible cause 5:

Mis-configuration of user files under /home/user… you can verify this by login with an other user… to fix it eventually delete and recreate the user (after backup)

Possible cause 7:

Graphic drivers, you need to check if you are using the proper graphic driver and or try a different version of the used driver, usually this often happen with nvidia graphical cards.

Other…

The listed situations are not the only possibilities of failure.

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