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I came across another one of my weird issues recently. In Unity3D games when running them my mouse pointer would just flash or flicker, and I found a simple solution.

Thanks to this old post on reddit:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor active false
Doing that line in terminal has fixed the issue for me with no other issues as a result of it.

I'm not sure how this is even an issue, and it's not related to Ubuntu, as I've seen others complain about the same thing across different distributions. It looks like a general Gnome issue I somehow fell into.

Hopefully that will help someone else who has come across such an annoying issue.

Hopefully someone can point out in the comments how and why it happens too, so that it could be fixed for people in future. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: HOWTO, Unity
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14 comments

scaine Mar 26, 2016
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Hmm - never had this before. I'm running stock Ubuntu 14.04, 64-bit, Unity desktop. I have Nvidia proprietary drivers on - we have much the same set up. I checked the value using dconf-editor and it was on. I've turned it off to see if I see a difference anywhere.
StianTheDark Mar 26, 2016
People say Ubuntu is so simple and easy, yet I've never ran into more issues than on Ubuntu ;) Now I'm happily settled in on Arch. Not to mention Mir coming over to ruin everything that the Linux community has used years on building up, with proprietary code! Yay!
Liam Dawe Mar 26, 2016
People say Ubuntu is so simple and easy, yet I've never ran into more issues than on Ubuntu ;) Now I'm happily settled in on Arch. Not to mention Mir coming over to ruin everything that the Linux community has used years on building up, with proprietary code! Yay!

Like i said in the article, this is not an Ubuntu issue, it happens in other distributions including Arch.
StianTheDark Mar 26, 2016
Like i said in the article, this is not an Ubuntu issue, it happens in other distributions including Arch.

The thing is, you would think that Ubuntu fixes this issue ;) I mean, it's for beginners! I have never had this issue on Arch. I have had it on Ubuntu however.
theRealPadster Mar 26, 2016
I recently installed Firewatch and I have this issue on Arch. When I run that line it says the schema doesn't exist. I couldn't find anything on gconf-editor. Possibly make one?
No such schema 'org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor'
StianTheDark Mar 26, 2016
I recently installed Firewatch and I have this issue on Arch. When I run that line it says the schema doesn't exist. I couldn't find anything on gconf-editor. Possibly make one?
No such schema 'org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor'

It doesn't exist on Arch. It's a thing Canonical has enabled in their thingy.
natewiebe13 Mar 26, 2016
People say Ubuntu is so simple and easy, yet I've never ran into more issues than on Ubuntu ;) Now I'm happily settled in on Arch. Not to mention Mir coming over to ruin everything that the Linux community has used years on building up, with proprietary code! Yay!
Since when is Mir proprietary? (Hint: It's not, it's licensed using GPLv3)
https://launchpad.net/mir
tadzik Mar 26, 2016
I recently installed Firewatch and I have this issue on Arch. When I run that line it says the schema doesn't exist. I couldn't find anything on gconf-editor. Possibly make one?
No such schema 'org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor'

It doesn't exist on Arch. It's a thing Canonical has enabled in their thingy.

See? It can be a bug on both, but Ubuntu made it actually fixable ;)
GBee Mar 26, 2016
My mouse doesn't flicker, or at least I've never noticed it, but then my attention tends to be on the screen when playing the game and not the peripherals.
Liam Dawe Mar 26, 2016
My mouse doesn't flicker, or at least I've never noticed it, but then my attention tends to be on the screen when playing the game and not the peripherals.

It's very noticeable if you have the issue, especially in games where you're looking towards a mouse pointer often like strategy games. You would know if you had it I'm sure.
GBee Mar 26, 2016
Joke fell flat ...

/me hangs his head and shuffles away
Beamboom Mar 27, 2016
To be honest this sounds much more like a Unity issue than Gnome issue. An irregular method of taking over mouse control/events or something.
I would not be surprised because, well... Unity.
jkaart Mar 27, 2016
Thanks!
Corben Mar 27, 2016
Doesn't work for me. I have this issue only on my Surface Pro 3 with an integrated intel GPU in the i7, running Ubuntu 15.10 with the neoreeps 4.3 kernel (https://github.com/neoreeps/surface-pro-3, which includes all the needed driver patches for the sp3).
But I got already used to it :-/

edit: oh, seems to have worked after a reboot. It looks like it also fixed another issue for me: I'm using synergy (http://synergy-project.org/), and I had to enter the screen twice before the mouse cursor was visible. Now it's visible each time I enter the screen. Cool 8)


Last edited by Corben on 27 March 2016 at 7:44 pm UTC
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