Mostly-short version: How can I figure out what package change resulted in my system changing to use a different cursor theme, and how can I revert it as completely as possible? Full-length version (or something like it): I recently rebooted for the first time since November 19th (there was a power outage), having upgraded many packages in the meantime. (For a reminder, I track testing, with fallback to stable when a package I want to install has been removed from testing.) After the upgrade, things looked normal at first, but I've just noticed that in many (most?) of the applications I run, the mouse cursor is far, far too big - enough so to be unwieldy, as well as visually unpleasant by my tastes - and is also a different shape and color from the cursor used in the window manager, i.e. when not using one of the affected programs. Specifically, the programs I've seen affected are Firefox, Thunderbird, Discord, and Tellico, and the programs I've seen *not* affected are uxterm, gkrellm, and lutris. My best guess is that the difference is that the affected programs use GTK, and the non-affected ones don't. I've managed to track down that these "new" oversized cursors are the ones provided by the breeze-cursor-theme package, and that the reason they're now in use is that that is now the one being pointed to by the x-cursor-theme entry in the Debian alternatives system. If I switch that alternative to point to Adwaita instead, and restart one of the affected applications, the problem - doesn't really *go away*, as such, but becomes much less noticeable; the cursors which come from Adwaita still aren't the same as the ones I see in the non-affected applications, but they aren't hugely oversized (though they may still be a bit big), and are black-and-white instead of gray-and-white. I can't entirely rule out that I may have been using Adwaita for some time before this event and not noticing it (at least not easily or with certainty), but I don't think so; some of the cursors (for example, the "hand" drag cursor) are still a different shape from what I think I remember. In some but not all of the affected programs, if I specify the gtk-cursor-theme-size setting in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and relaunch the program, the cursors are smaller according to the specified size value. Unfortunately, some of the program seem to ignore this setting. Any suggestions as to * what may have triggered the system to change the default cursor theme like this? There was a new version of the breeze-cursor-theme package installed during the time-frame since the previous reboot, and it does appear to have included a new upstream version, but so far I'm not finding anything about that upgrade which looks like it should have changed the system's configured settings. * how I can identify what cursor theme is being used by the rest of my environment (including the window manager, which is e16), and potentially get these programs to use it too? * how I can configure the cursors to be smaller, in a way which all of these programs should recognize and respect? (...and after I've written the above, I notice that among the packages upgraded in the relevant time-frame was the set that come from the source package gtk-3.0, and that the upgrade included a new upstream version. That's probably more likely to be the locus of the change than anything else I've seen thus far, although a preliminary examination of the changelog files doesn't seem to show anything relevant.) -- The Wanderer The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw
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