Massive Cursor In Brave W/Fractional Scaling

General Help
1

Hello! New to the forum, but I have been supporting Zorin with Pro purchases every release for 4–5 years.

Today I ran into a weird bug that I can't seem to figure out.

The Issue:

The default brave installation of Zorin 17.3 was blurry (along with some other apps) when fractional scaling is enabled. That has been fixed by changing Ozone flag as mentioned here.

Everything has been running great till today, when all of a sudden the cursor got MASSIVE when hovering over a brave window.

Chrome is fine, all other apps are fine, but on brave it's huge.

Not sure how to fix this, but I'll attach a screenshot of the cursor hovering brave vs chrome for an example.

NOTE: I just tried switching away from Adwaita cursor and that did seem to fix it... the other cursors are terrible, so I'd like to keep Adwaita.

Any ideas on what I should do to fix this?

Chrome:

Screenshot from 2025-04-02 22-01-57
Screenshot from 2025-04-02 22-01-571003×705 26.9 KB

Brave:

Screenshot from 2025-04-02 22-02-27
Screenshot from 2025-04-02 22-02-271386×1127 182 KB

Edit: I'm reviewing the screenshots, and somehow the screenshots made the cursor look normal in both images... No idea why because that is NOT what I'm seeing on my screen.

2

Hi, welcome to the community!

I'm curious if this still happens when you switch to using Xorg, instead of the default Wayland display servers. To change, you'll have to logout of your account and click on the lower right corner button:

sc1
sc11024×768 4.85 KB

Select the option that says Zorin Desktop on Xorg, and log in normally.

2 Likes
3

Hey @zenzen

The issue is not present under Xorg, only the default wayland.

4

When using wayland, can you use Gsettings to set a size you prefer?
I will set to 24px, but you can change that value:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface cursor-size 24

systemctl restart gdm

5

@Aravisian I can set the cursor size using the described method, restart gdm, and it does change the cursor. But, brave still magnifies it.

I will note - I have an essentially default install of zorin. No theming tweaks, and the only non-standard app I installed is obsidian as a .deb.

The only browser tweaks I have are:

  • Set Preferred Ozone platform to Wayland (changing it back to default does not fix the cursor)
  • Installed Bitwarden extension

If it helps, I updated the system yesterday, which included a brave update from package version 1.76.82 to 1.77.95.

Better screenshots to show the cursor difference:

Normal:

Cursor Normal
Cursor Normal640×313 42.9 KB

Brave:

Cursor Brave
Cursor Brave640×313 44.4 KB

6

Is Brave installed as a Flatpak?

If this is a default install... the ZorinGroup stated that Brave Browser will be supplied by APT by default. But let's check anyway.

7

Its installed from APT

APT Brave Install
APT Brave Install793×121 14.7 KB

8

If you run

export XCURSOR_THEME=Adwaita && brave-browser

which should launch Brave, does the cursor appear normal?

9

Closed browser, and launched with:

export XCURSOR_THEME=Adwaita && brave-browser

The browser launched, and cursor remains extra large.

10

Wayland is fun.

How intent are you on keeping Wayland active for Brave? If setting the ozone variable was an effort to fix, rather than keep... You could disable that, then test

env --unset=WAYLAND_DISPLAY brave-browser

11

As a sanity check, I disabled fractional scaling under wayland to see if the issue was solved and it is.

So, this seems to be related to wayland, fractional scaling.

12

Un-setting Brave from wayland , then setting Ozone platform back to X11 does fix the cursor.

But we are back to terrible blurring issues (which wayland fixed)

13

Ok... let's try

brave-browser --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform-hint=x11

14

The result of this is:
No blurring + massive cursor. lol

15

We are reaching terminal velocity:

export WLR_NO_HARDWARE_CURSORS=1 && export XCURSOR_SIZE=24 && brave-browser

16

This seems to net the same result.

Maybe i'll see if I can add a new cursor, and test that.

17

Here is an update:

I'm not sure why this never crossed my mind, and it does not fix the issue in question but it works for me.

My laptop has a 16" 16x10 2560x1600 display.

I have been suffering through fractional scaling issues for some time now, with 125% scaling.

I did not pick this laptop for the resolution, I chose it for the other hardware.

Soooo....

Somehow It JUST crossed my mind that I could simply set the display to 1920x1200, and run 100% scaling instead of 2560x1600 at 125%.

It works perfect, and solves all the fractional scaling issues I have been experiencing.

Thank you for contributing to this thread @Aravisian and @zenzen !

I'll mark this as closed.

2 Likes
18

Pure genius.

19

Feels lame that it took so long to grasp that idea :rofl:

PS - I did revert brave back a version and the issue went away. So the original issue seems to be a problem with the brave update.

1 Like
20

Good thinking! I agree, there must be something in the newer versions of Brave that is messing with things here... you might want to raise this issue with their community as well, in case they have some information or a possible workaround.

EDIT:

Another thread reporting the same issue, which seems to suggest an issue with upstream Chromium:

2 Likes