Mouse cursor nigh invisible when I turn on HDR (original) (raw)

Hi everyone,

so the issue I’m facing is that my mouse cursor becomes nigh invisible when I turn on HDR with dark style on. The white outline that is supposed to highlight the cursor becomes about 1px wide grey shadow. I’d provide a screenshot or video capture to illustrate my issue, but unfortunately whenever I try to capture the issue on a screenshot or video, the recording shows the pointer as it should be, not as it is on my screen.

Taking a photo with my phone seems pointless as well, as all these photo filters that modern phones use to enhance colours and contrasts make the issue look negligible, while in reality, I’m struggling to see where my pointer is most of the time.

I’d tried changing cursor themes multiple times, while focusing on cursor visibility, but all the parts of the cursor that are supposed to be white turn dark grey whenever I turn HDR on.

The only workaround (assuming I want to keep both HDR and dark style on) I’d arrived at so far, was to install the pointer tracker extension and attach a tiny white dot to my cursor, which isn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, but at least allows me to see what I’m clicking.

System info:
Display: CORSAIR XENEON FLEX 45WQHD240
GPU: AMD Radeon 9070 XT
Connected through: display port to display port cable
OS: Bazzite Gnome 42
HDR: On, brightness is set to max (doesn’t change cursor visibility even when set to lowest)

skeller (Sebastian Keller) June 5, 2025, 11:55am 2

There are a couple of issues in AMD drivers causing wrong gamma for hardware cursors:

You can try using the MUTTER_DEBUG_DISABLE_HW_CURSORS=1 environment variable to work around this until the driver is fixed.

Thank you, that did indeed seem to fix the issue.

Including steps I took for anyone else looking for a solution:

mkdir -p ~/.config/environment.d
tee ~/.config/environment.d/10-mutter-disable-hwc.conf <<EOF
MUTTER_DEBUG_DISABLE_HW_CURSORS=1
EOF