Changing your mouse cursor

There's not an installed method for managing your cursor themes, and installing new cursor themes isn't straightforward, but it can be done.

First, we install gnome-tweaks, which allows us to change the cursor theme...
sudo apt install gnome-tweaks

Open the Tweaks application and click Appearance. There you will find Cursor, with the ability to choose Adwaita (default), Handhelds, Redglass and Whiteglass.

But what if you want a different cursor theme?

Well, to begin, you should know that if you only want the cursor theme to apply to your user account, you'd create a new .icons directory under the Home directory, then download and extract the cursors to that .icons directory.

If you want the cursor theme to apply to all user accounts, you'd download and extract the cursors under the /usr/share/icons directory, instead. The cursor theme will have its own directory under /usr/share/icons.

Some cursor themes can be downloaded and installed programmatically. For instance, I installed the Phinger cursor theme:
sudo su

wget -cO- https://github.com/phisch/phinger-cursors/releases/latest/download/phinger-cursors-variants.tar.bz2 | tar xfj - -C /usr/share/icons

Then in the Tweaks application, you should see two new cursor options: Phinger-cursors-light and Phinger-cursors.

And under /usr/share/icons you should see two new directories: phinger-cursors and phinger-cursors-light.

If you're looking to save hard drive space, the Redglass and Whiteglass cursor themes are installed via xcursor-themes, so if you're not using them, you can:
sudo apt purge xcursor-themes
... to save 3.784 MB of drive space.

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