Mouse cursor leaving "trails" / artifacts

On Ubuntu Gnome 15.10, my mouse cursor leaves strange "trails" all around the screen. This happens when the cursor moves over or leaves a dynamic screen element (anything that changes on hover) such as a link or a toolbar button.

Here's a quick screencast showing what it looks like (posted on YouTube)

Any help to fix this quirk would be appreciated.

Solution 1:

If you have Universal Access > Zoom enabled on Ubuntu then in my experience you will get a square artifact that follows your cursor and leaves a trail (but only on the desktop, not over application windows). Turning off the Zoom feature (and enabling only when I need it) solves this artifact issue for me on Ubuntu (18,19 and now 20LTS).

Solution 2:

I had the same problem in Kubuntu 16.04 and got rid of the trails by turning the Tearing / VSync to always redraw everything (System Settings > Display > Compositor). You get also rid of the trails by turning off OpenGL (also found in the Compositor settings), but then you lose hardware acceleration.

Solution 3:

Thanks to Mark's answer which led me to look for ways to configure Gnome to redraw everything on vsync, I finally found a fix for this in Gnome. Just add this line to your /etc/environment file:

CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling

I am finally free of cursor trails and screen tearing in Ubuntu 16.04 with Gnome 3.18.2.

Solution 4:

Same problem with Ubuntu 18.04LTS that installed KiCad 4.0.7. Fixed with installing KiCad 5 from http://kicad-pcb.org/download/ubuntu/ .

NB: you don't really download from the KiCad home site, but using the instructions for Ubuntu, you add a download site to your software downloader with a PPA. Then use 'apt' to install KiCad 5. Pretty simple procedure with simple instructions. This way, you will automatically upgrade to new versions like any other Ubuntu packages.

Solution 5:

I had a problem with screen tearing just after upgrading Kubuntu 16.10 to 17.04. Answers from Joseph and comment from MariusMatutiae (under Mark's answer) helped me but I had to use both solutions together. To sum up I:

Went to System settings > Display and Monitor > Compositor
Set Rendering backend to OpenGL 3.1
Set Tearing prevention ("vsync") to Full screen repaints
Added CLUTTER_PAINT=disable-clipped-redraws:disable-culling in /etc/environment
Logged out and logged back in