No longer compatible with X11 cursor theme "standard", recover symlinks please
With the removal of "legacy" X11 cursors (via #251 (closed), 74e9b794), we opened a can of worms with incompatibilities everywhere.
- The Adwaita cursor theme does not provide the cursors typically expected by X11 apps, window managers and so on, yet at first glance looks just like doing so (by providing a cursor.index and cursors director inside an icon theme)
- A lot of GNOME software needed or still needs to be adjusted to this change, including Mutter and multiple versions of GTK.
- A lot of third party software needed or still needs to be adjusted to this change, including Firefox, Chrome (and therefor Electron apps), LibreOffice, OpenJDK, ... The list is probably long and the break in compatibility is huge due to the default pointer cursor affected.
- The changes in GNOME software likely make some of them incompatible with existing X11 cursor themes (including the "official" default themes). For example, mutter and gnome-shell now don't show the default pointer cursor of the Whiteglass cursor theme from xcursor-themes when it is configured for use (and instead fallback to the Adwaita cursor).
All of this seems very unnecessary. I totally go with the intention to migrate to a new cursor naming scheme, but providing legacy compatibility via symlinks would have been easy and without any downsides. I now run my system with a symlink left_ptr -> default
, which fixes most of the issues with third-party apps when using Adwaita cursor theme. I think this should be the default, and we probably should also add a bunch of other symlinks for relevant/popular "legacy" cursor names.
Edited by Marvin W