Cursors theme not works

Hello all.

I have installed
bibata-cursor-themes
from
Copr repo for rendezvous owned by peterwu

I use “Gnome Tweaks” application to set cursors and they works.

That cursors installs itself under:

/usr/share/icons/Bibata-...

Now when I copy them to (with different name not to be confused)

~/.local/share/icons/

They also works.

But when I copy them to (with different name not to be confused)

/usr/local/share/icons/

they kind of works but not “fully”: they works for example when mouse pointer is over file manager, or Ptyxis terminal, but when mouse pointer is over desktop background, or top Gnome desktop bar, or even Firefox, cursors fall back to default.

Similar when I download my custom bibata cursors
and put them under

- ~/.local/share/icons/

they works
but put under

/usr/local/share/icons

not fully works.

You say they work in some locations, but not others?
What do you want them to do?

I’m not really clear on what you are asking.

For example:

  • they works when mouse pointer is over file manager, or Ptyxis terminal,
  • but when mouse pointer is over desktop background, or top Gnome desktop bar, or even Firefox, cursors fall back to default.

Perhaps someone could try to copy cursor theme to

/usr/local/share/icons/

(just change name to something else not to be confused when choosing them) and try ?

It happens on my Silverblue on my PC and in my Virtualbox.

So you are following the instructions from GitHub - ful1e5/Bibata_Cursor: Open source, compact, and material designed cursor set.
which say
‘’‘Linux X11/Wayland
Installation:
tar -xvf Bibata.tar.gz # extract Bibata.tar.gz
mv Bibata-* ~/.local/share/icons/ # Install to local users
sudo mv Bibata-* /usr/share/icons/ # Install to all users’‘’

Do you need to enable the cursors for all users? Could you stop at step 2 where they work for local users?

I am not on Gnome so I cannot test it for you.

When I put cursors under

~/.local/share/icons/

they works.

I can not put cursors under

/usr/share/icons/

because I am on Silverblue,
but these (for example installed as rpm) under that directory works.

When I put cursors under

/usr/local/share/icons

they not fully works.

Maybe some kind of issue with file permissions and ownership?

Do you see any difference between the permissions/ownership for the files copied manually, and the ones installed as RPM?

Can you also check the output of echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS?

> echo $XDG_DATA_DIRS 
/var/home/tomek/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share:/var/lib/flatpak/exports/share:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/
> ls -ladZ /usr/
drwxr-xr-x. 13 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Jan  1  1970 /usr/

ls -ladZ /usr/share/
drwxr-xr-x. 259 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 12288 Jan  1  1970 /usr/share/

ls -ladZ /usr/share/icons/
drwxr-xr-x. 26 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Jan  1  1970 /usr/share/icons/

ls -ladZ /usr/share/icons/Bibata-Modern-Amber
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Jan  1  1970 /usr/share/icons/Bibata-Modern-Amber

# --- It is a link ---- #
> ls -ladZ /usr/local
lrwxrwxrwx. 5 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 15 May  2  2021 /usr/local -> ../var/usrlocal

> ls -ladZ /var/
drwxr-xr-x. 27 root root system_u:object_r:var_t:s0 4096 Jan 14 07:58 /var/

> ls -ladZ /var/usrlocal/
drwxr-xr-x. 12 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Sep 20 16:06 /var/usrlocal/

> ls -ladZ /var/usrlocal/share/
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root system_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Jun 17  2021 /var/usrlocal/share/

ls -ladZ /var/usrlocal/share/icons/
drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root unconfined_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Jan 16 14:14 /var/usrlocal/share/icons/

> ls -ladZ /var/usrlocal/share/icons/XXX
drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root unconfined_u:object_r:usr_t:s0 4096 Jan 15 18:19 /var/usrlocal/share/icons/XXX

I think your problem is more general, and not specific to your installation, and probably not even particular to Silverblue.

I have installed a couple of cursor themes from the repos on a Fedora Workstation VM installation (e.g. oxygen-cursor-themes, bluecurve-cursor-theme, breeze-cursor-theme), and most of them (but not all) have to behavior you’re describing (e.g. mouse pointer moved over desktop background turns it back to the default theme).

The way I understand Linux directories structure / hierarchy is:

/usr/share/
is for system wide functionalities/ features that comes along with system or rpm packages.

/usr/local/share/
is for system wide functionalities/ features that admin can apply/ add - to avoid meddling / breaking what system / rpm provides by default.

~/.local/share/
is for regular user functionalities/ features.

1) and 3) works.
2) does not.


How / where could I report that ?

Well, narrowing it down, assuming that this doesn’t happen with another DE’s shipped by Fedora (e.g. KDE edition or Kinoite), and if (preferably) it is reproducible on other distros shipped with GNOME 47, I would say the best place to report it is with GNOME. I couldn’t tell for sure against which project though. Probably Mutter.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3882

1 Like