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On Ubuntu Gnome 15.10, my mouse cursor leaves strange "trails" all around the screen. This happens when the cursor moves over or leaves a dynamic screen element (anything that changes on hover) such as a link or a toolbar button.

Here's a quick screencast showing what it looks like (posted on YouTube)

Any help to fix this quirk would be appreciated.

Zanna
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Phani K
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6 Answers6

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If you have Universal Access > Zoom enabled on Ubuntu then in my experience you will get a square artifact that follows your cursor and leaves a trail (but only on the desktop, not over application windows). Turning off the Zoom feature (and enabling only when I need it) solves this artifact issue for me on Ubuntu (18,19 and now 20LTS).

Zanna
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ubuntux
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I had the same problem in Kubuntu 16.04 and got rid of the trails by turning the Tearing / VSync to always redraw everything (System Settings > Display > Compositor). You get also rid of the trails by turning off OpenGL (also found in the Compositor settings), but then you lose hardware acceleration.

Mark
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Same problem with Ubuntu 18.04LTS that installed KiCad 4.0.7. Fixed with installing KiCad 5 from http://kicad-pcb.org/download/ubuntu/ .

NB: you don't really download from the KiCad home site, but using the instructions for Ubuntu, you add a download site to your software downloader with a PPA. Then use 'apt' to install KiCad 5. Pretty simple procedure with simple instructions. This way, you will automatically upgrade to new versions like any other Ubuntu packages.

Roland
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Thanks to Mark's answer which led me to look for ways to configure Gnome to redraw everything on vsync, I finally found a fix for this in Gnome. Just add this line to your /etc/environment file:

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling

I am finally free of cursor trails and screen tearing in Ubuntu 16.04 with Gnome 3.18.2.

Joseph Mansfield
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I had a problem with screen tearing just after upgrading Kubuntu 16.10 to 17.04. Answers from Joseph and comment from MariusMatutiae (under Mark's answer) helped me but I had to use both solutions together. To sum up I:

  1. Went to System settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor
  2. Set Rendering backend to OpenGL 3.1
  3. Set Tearing prevention ("vsync") to Full screen repaints
  4. Added CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling in /etc/environment
  5. Logged out and logged back in
Szymon Sadło
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I just had this problem with Linux Mint 18.2 (based on Ubuntu 16.04) freshly installed and running Cinnamon. One monitor is plugged to my i7 Sky lake and one is on a Radeon R7. I updated the kernel to the new 4.13 released yesterday but it didn't changed anything. I tried to switch the main monitor, no result. I don't have a the compositor setting in Cinnamon, but I know this was a GPU driver problem, to repaint everything everytime didn't look like a nice solution. So I updated Mesa from 17.0.2 to 17.1.2 (even if it's still OpenGL 3) and then activated DRI3 instead of DRI2 (following this wiki page) and TADA! No artifacts anymore!

Fla
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