Mouse cursor flickering and disappearing

Question

I installed Ubuntu today and since the first start up I have a problem with the mouse cursor.

It starts randomly disappearing and flickering a lot.

I have searched for a solution on Google and here but didn't find anything.

Answer 1

I had the same problem. You can fix it manually.

Open System Settings > Displays.

In the Displays window, you will see an Unknown monitor.

Click it and disable it.

Answer 2

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.

Source: Linuxhacks.org
Disclosure: I am the owner of Linuxhacks.org

Answer 3

2020 - Ubuntu 18.04

The problem here was because of I have Dell's laptop and Dells's Monitor, there isn't any "unknown display".

The Ubuntu wasn't recognizing the laptop as "built in".

After setup everything and restart the laptop, all works fine.

Answer 4

I was able to fix the issue by changing my monitor setup using randr. It turned out that my second screen had a rather large offset to the first one (instead of being directly adjacent). My best guess is that this creates a large mostly unused framebuffer that also covers the area between the screens, which may be problematic?

You can either use a tool like arandr to place the screens without a gap in a GUI or run xrandr on the command line like so

xrandr --output HDMI-1 --left-of DP-1 (replace your respective monitor outputs, you can find out their name by running xrandr without arguments)

Answer 5

In my case, using Ubuntu 22.04, I was able to resolve the problem by switching off Fractional Scaling. Settings then Screen Display then turn off Fractional Scaling

Answer 6

I ran, from within 16.04, the command:

  sudo apt-get upgrade

and it seems to have appeased the pointer, so far. I had instability, especially over the Chrome browser tabs.