NixOS and Firefox Flatpak Package Small Mouse Cursor

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1

Do You Too Have Mouse Cursor Envy?

Does it look like this?

small_mouse
small_mouse841×462 79.6 KB

When running a default Firefox flatpak package install, is your mouse so small it’s almost invisible? Did you try all the nixos linking of “icons” paths, filesystem permissions for flat pack, and variable assignments like XCURSOR_PATH without success?

I too read every article on the forums, reddit posts, and random github issues with all these “solutions” that did not work for me.

What Fixed It?

Don’t worry, it’s not a little blue pill… :grin:
For me, there where 2 options in Flatseal that fixed my “incredibly averaged sized” mouse cursor. These 2 options are on by default:

flatpak_options_culprits
flatpak_options_culprits1283×862 94.8 KB

Turn those off and close Firefox and reopen firefox. This should fix your size issue.

Lurking Variables

I am using home-manager and I did install 2 packages that could have affected things in combination with turning off of the Wayland and fallback options:

pkgs.xsettingsd
pkgs.xorg.xrdb

I will remove these from my home.nix and do some testing to make sure they aren’t needed and report back here if I find something else does affect the mouse scaling issue.

Firefox Flatpak with Wayland

I am guessing it is possible to get the mouse to the correct size with the default Wayland options since it looks like a scaling and cursor issue. If anyone has NixOS and a default Firefox Flatpak install working I’d like to know. If you also have home-manager working with it, even better.

2

Addendum

I was wrong and there is one other thing that is important:

ln -s /run/current-system/sw/share/icons .local/share/icons

you need to symbolically link the icons directory to your .local/share directory for the mouse cursor size and style to be picked up.

Also worth noting that the 2 Flatseal options, if turned on, disappear the “minimize” and “maximize” buttons.

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3

Thanks for sharing. I also came across this issue today, I’m using nix-flatpak and could fix it by adding this to Context.filesystems:

  services.flatpak = {
    overrides = {
      global = {
        # Fix cursor
        Context.filesystems = [
          "$HOME/.local/share/fonts:ro"
          "$HOME/.icons:ro"
          "/nix/store:ro"
        ];

        # Force Wayland by default
        Context.sockets = ["wayland" "!x11" "!fallback-x11"];
      };
    };

    update.auto = {
      enable = true;
      onCalendar = "daily";
    };

    packages = [....];
  };
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