Bug#755050: gnome-settings-daemon: cursor plugin makes mouse pointer disappear in non-Shell sessions

[Simon McVittie]

On Thu, 17 Jul 2014 at 09:44:33 +0200, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> since upgrading [g-s-d] from 3.8.5-2+b2 to 3.12.2-1, my mouse pointer was
> invisible after login.

Looking at <https://bugs.debian.org/762512> it seems that the intention
these days is:

* gnome-settings-daemon is only intended to work with GNOME Shell
  (or at least Mutter);
* non-Shell GNOME sessions should run gnome-flashback components instead of
  gnome-settings-daemon;
* non-GNOME sessions should not run either

In particular, the Compiz- and Metacity-based sessions provided by
gnome-session-flashback already do this, so they should no longer be
affected by this.

gnome-flashback and/or g-s-d maintainers: is what I said above accurate?

Gtk 3.14+ defaults to the Adwaita theme that is also the GNOME default,
instead of the ugly Raleigh theme that was historically the Gtk default,
which I think removes one historical reason why users of other desktops
might have wanted to run gnome-settings-daemon.

I see xmonad has dropped its built-in support for running a hybrid
xmonad + GNOME session, so it is not directly relevant here.

openbox-gnome-session's /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/openbox-gnome.session
and /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/openbox-gnome-fallback.session still
uses gnome-settings-daemon, so they probably still suffer from this bug?
Similarly, cairo-dock-core appears to use gnome-settings-daemon in its
cairo-dock + compiz + GNOME session.

On Wed, 30 Jul 2014 at 10:52:08 +0200, Michał Politowski wrote:
> Same problem under gnome-session-flashback.
> Disabling the cursor plugin with dconf also helped here (after restart).

This particular case should have been fixed in September (gnome-panel/3.8.1-4)
according to <https://bugs.debian.org/762512>, because gnome-session-flashback
no longer uses gnome-settings-daemon.

Regards,
    S