Unity System Compositor --enable-hardware-cursor=true option no longer required.

[Christopher Townsend]

Recently, Unity 8 provides its own cursor, so we no longer need the "--enable-hardware-cursor=true" option in unity-system-compositor.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Daniel d'Andrada (dandrader)]

I think that will just make unity-system-compositor fallback to using a "software", GL, cursor instead. But then in Mir's innards it might simply behave better (ie, obey to unity8 orders to get mir cursor hidden) than the hardware cursor implementation.

[Daniel d'Andrada (dandrader)]

After talking about it over IRC, my understanding in comment #3 is wrong as the parameter does not mean that. So please ignore comment #3

[Alan Griffiths (alan-griffiths)]

The USC code isn't the clearest: "--enable-hardware-cursor" is an option to enable the default Mir cursor and defaults to disabling it.

If Mir isn't hiding the cursor correctly that's a separate issue that ought to be addressed.

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

This problem will occur if running vivid with the overlay PPA [1]. We can't SRU this change to vivid since this will break users not using the PPA. There is an option to put a modified version of LightDM in the PPA, but I'm not going to do that as that will create a maintenance issue.

If this is an issue I think the best workaround is probably to set the command for unity-system-compositor in lightdm.conf:

[SeatDefaults]
unity-system-compositor-command=/usr/sbin/unity-system-compositor.wrapper

And then strip out the --enable-hardware cursor in this wrapper script.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~ci-train-ppa-service/+archive/ubuntu/stable-phone-overlay

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package lightdm - 1.17.3-0ubuntu1

---------------
lightdm (1.17.3-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release:
    - Don't enable the hardware cursor in Unity System Compositor anymore.
      Unity 8 now correctly provides its own cursor and other shells should too
      (LP: #1517615)
  * debian/guest-session.profile:
    - Fix guest session dialog sleep (LP: #1526004)

 -- Robert Ancell <email address hidden> Thu, 17 Dec 2015 13:12:24 +1300