I am new to Fedora. I have been with Zorin OS for one month. Until my VPN wiped out my OS. My Genius of a Nephew Installed Fedora Cosmic Atomic with KDE Plasma. I just today did a update in terminal. Still learning the Linux Terminal. Bit scary for me.
My main question is. How on earth do I change the curse size and color. I have a hard time seeing. I had a Medium Red Cursor in Zorin. That helped me a lot.
I have read the Cosmic Atomic can’t change the cursor. I don’t know if that is right. i have been in the accessibilty in “Settings” I have done a search. There is no “Seeing” where the cursor says the cursor settings are. Any help would be wounderful.
On a side note. I noticed the fedora forum, is kinda like the zorin forum. Shouldn’t be to much to learn.
This statement is mixing a few things: two desktop environments, Cosmic and KDE Plasma, and the concept of an atomic distro. I doubt that you have both Cosmic and KDE Plasma installed as that would require overlaying a large number of packages onto the base system with its desktop environment. It could be done, but it would not be pleasant. And on atomic distros, switching DEs is easy, see below.
In case you are currently using KDE Plasma, you can change the cursor size in the System Settings app. Under “Colors & Themes”, there is an entry “Pointers”, which has a selection drop down for the pointer size:
Finally, if you are indeed using Cosmic Atomic, it is relatively simple to switch to a different variant, like KDE Plasma or Workstation. Cosmic is still a young desktop environment and might have fewer features and more bugs than some of the more mature alternatives. In the language of the Atomic distros, this is called ‘rebasing’. For example, rebasing to Kinoite, which is the Atomic variant with KDE Plasma, should be as simple as running this command (note, this is from memory, I currently don’t have an Atomic distro to test):
$ sudo rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/44/x86_64/kinoite
Also, be aware that rebasing should be a relatively safe operation, but there is always a risk, so I suggest you backup your data before going down this route.
I have been trying to log in to my account for 30 minutes. Can’t do it. I don’t have nothing like you are showing me. I know my nephew installed Cosmic Atomic. Said it would be better for me. Since I am new. I think he said less terminal. Then when We got to choosing a desktop. He said KDE Plasms is best. Then ask me colors. He did a lot of installing for me. He was moving at the speed of light.
Rebasing would wipe out everything that has been installed? Printer/Scanner software etc. ?
I understand that it was new for you and it happened fast. But the way you describe it doesn’t make sense. And I am not saying this to make you feel bad, but to explain why I am having a hard time figuring out what state your computer is in and to recommend a course of action.
With Fedora’s atomic distros, you get one desktop environment in the image. If you want Gnome, you install Silverblue, for KDE Plasma you install Kinoite, and for the new Cosmic desktop environment you install Cosmic Atomic. You choose the desktop environment by choosing the atomic variant.
Technically, you could probably install Cosmic Atomic, which uses the Cosmic desktop environment, and then add all the pieces (i.e., packages) that make up KDE Plasma. But as I said before, you wouldn’t have a good time. And with rebasing, there is a preferred way to get the desktop environment you want.
Normally, it shouldn’t lose any customisations you have made. Rebasing just switches out the immutable operating system image and leaves all the changes you have made on top of that. But because you aren’t familiar with the system and I am not sure what your nephew actually did, it might be best to ask him to make the changes.
Ok, I can log back in now. I should say. That my nephew set up my system so I wouldn’t have do to much in terminal. I would also call my nephew a super genius. Which I did not know. He won first place in state in tech. And won nationals with team, and won 3rd place. With something that Cisco puts on. For Tech students. Now saying all that. He told me he got tired of Linux and made is own Operating System. I am trying to decide if I want to go to another version. Here are some screenshots.
You can do most things from the GUI in Fedora these days. AFAIK, rebasing atomic distros isn’t on of them, though.
I usually default to the terminal, because it’s quicker for me. It is also easier to tell someone “execute this command” than it is to guide them through multiple steps of GUI dialogs and telling them what buttons to click.
OK, this is definitely the Cosmic desktop environment. It is still a relatively new project, I think it was released at the end of 2025. And from what I’ve seen there are still aspects of it that might have benefitted from a little more time to mature.
Anyway, you need to decide how important the mouse cursor customization is for you. KDE Plasma can definitely do it, but it also offers much more, which can be overwhelming.
Ok, I think for now I will say with the cursor. Maybe later there will be updates to fix all of this. I did find a code to update, did that the other day. Wasn’t bad. Got a few things that I was missing. As you can tell I am having trouble logging in again to my forum account. Not being able to log in is getting iratainting.
Thank you for all your help.
I do agree with you, with fedora should have put more time in before releasing the version.
That is not what I was trying to say. System76 is the company developing the Cosmic desktop environment, mostly for their own Pop!_OS distribution. In December 2025, they released version 1.0. And from what I have seen, it had the feature set of a 1.0 release and the issues of one, too. That’s why I said it could have used a little more maturing, and maybe it already has in the almost eight months since then.
But because it was released as a stable version by its developers, I cannot blame the Fedora folks for including it and creating a Cosmic spin.
Thank you for clearing that. I was told by my nephew that it was pop os. And that is where he got it. But the download wasn’t there anymore. When He installed it on my computer. He also said that Pop OS was good too.
