Gnome broke after trying plasma

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1

Recently, I wanted to give Plasma a try as I’ve been using gnome for a while. Plasma had some issues so I wanted to revert back to gnome. However, gnome is broken now.
Gnome applications don’t open, and the cursor is missing in the overview.
Running gnome-control-center from a terminal produces the following error.

$ gnome-control-center
(gnome-control-center:17892): Gdk-WARNING **: 20:08:50.334: Failed to load cursor theme breeze_cursors

(gnome-control-center:17892): Gdk-WARNING **: 20:08:50.353: Failed to load cursor theme breeze_cursors
**
Gdk:ERROR:../gdk/wayland/gdkdisplay-wayland.c:1149:_gdk_wayland_display_get_scaled_cursor_theme: assertion failed: (display_wayland->cursor_theme_name)
Bail out! Gdk:ERROR:../gdk/wayland/gdkdisplay-wayland.c:1149:_gdk_wayland_display_get_scaled_cursor_theme: assertion failed: (display_wayland->cursor_theme_name)
Aborted (core dumped)

I see the same behavior when trying to launch an earlier generation as well.

I want to make sure there’s nothing obvious I’m missing, if not I will submit a proper bug report.

> nixos-version
21.05.4051.9e86f5f7a19 (Okapi)

[inside configuration.nix]
  # Enable the GNOME Desktop Environment.
  services.xserver.displayManager.gdm.enable = true;
  services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true;
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2

cc @jtojnar , who likely know about these gnome issues

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3

Plasma changes the cursor theme to one that now does not exist. You should be able to fix it by running dconf reset /org/gnome/desktop/interface/cursor-theme.

Also seen in Missing cursor theme in GNOME · Issue #140505 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub.

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4

Thank you! That did seem to solve it for a second (cursor exists in overview), but now it’s complaining that the Adwaita cursor theme does not exist when I try to open gnome-control-center.

(gnome-control-center:2840): Gdk-WARNING **: 22:36:20.937: Failed to load cursor theme Adwaita

(gnome-control-center:2840): Gdk-WARNING **: 22:36:20.955: Failed to load cursor theme Adwaita
**
Gdk:ERROR:../gdk/wayland/gdkdisplay-wayland.c:1149:_gdk_wayland_display_get_scaled_cursor_theme: assertion failed: (display_wayland->cursor_theme_name)
Bail out! Gdk:ERROR:../gdk/wayland/gdkdisplay-wayland.c:1149:_gdk_wayland_display_get_scaled_cursor_theme: assertion failed: (display_wayland->cursor_theme_name)
Aborted (core dumped)

[edit]
Updating to unstable fixed it.

5

Just to say many years later I ran into this same issue when switching to Gnome from Plasma!

Running the following two commands sorted things out for me

dconf reset /org/gnome/desktop/interface/cursor-theme
dconf reset /org/gnome/desktop/interface/icon-theme

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