[PATCH] xserver: Enable visible cursor on start without -retro #26798

[Pat Kane]

I would like to have a visible cursor by default.

The ugly root weave can stay hidden --  but I kinda like it,
since it looks really bad on crufty displays.

Oh, and I think the bike shed needs to be painted a slightly
darker shade of black (-BR ?).

Pat
---


On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 12:46 AM, Samuel Thibault
<samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
> Dave Airlie, le Thu 21 Oct 2010 12:10:14 +1000, a écrit :
>> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Samuel Thibault
>> <samuel.thibault at ens-lyon.org> wrote:
>> > Not having a visible cursor by default poses problems with a lot of users: when
>> > they are faced with a completely dark screen without even a moving mouse, they
>> > think their machine is completely hung, while it could just be that X clients
>> > can't connect or are not starting for some reason.
>>
>> NAK on the this needs discussion grounds.
>>
>> Seems like this was the whole point of the retro stuff in the first
>> place, to not display a cursor and not draw a background.
>
> Well, I can understand that not drawing a background is nicer looking.
> But not showing a cursor really apparently really is a pain for the
> user.  I _keep_ getting user feedback about "my X server is hung", and
> Xorg.0.log posts which of course don't contain fatal error messages,
> frustrated users etc.  While the problem often simply is that the user
> doesn't have xauth, or such...  See
>
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26798
>
> Really, not having a cursor poses a real problem: users assuming wrong
> things (and I wouldn't even dream a user wondering "what if I passed
> that -retro thing to get back into the 1988 to check whether it's really
> the X server that hangs", it just won't ever happen).
>
> While having a cross-cursor for a few seconds...  Is it really _so_ ugly
> that we want to get those bug reports?  Frankly enough, I think I'll be
> thick-headed enough to report on this thread for each user report having
> the same issue as mentioned above, just like I did 5 times already
> since February (and I'm just talking about Hurd user reports, i.e. an
> extremely small part of the Xorg users).
>
> Samuel
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