A recent GTK change introduced a bug where if there was a missing cursor pointer, it fallback to Adwaita¹. I noticed this immediately, looked into the issue and the change was reverted. But my cursor pointer was still missing, it just defaulted to default X11 cursor, something I had not noticed earlier. X11 cursor theme is very unflattering.

I was using the DMZ Vanilla cursor theme, which I believe was default on Ubuntu back in the day.

At this point I was looking for a replacement. I liked DMZ Vanilla, but it is outdated and there were issues with missing pointers. I need something that looks fine and just works.

I never liked KDE's Breeze cursor theme. They are fine, they are just a bit too playful. I looked into the Adwaita cursor theme, which is very similar to DMZ Vanilla, but black. It is most likely the continuation of DMZ Vanilla (AA)², and since I have GNOME's Adwaita (like KDE's Breeze) installed as dependencies, I might as well use them. No more missing cursors, it just works.

Speaking of too playful.. honourable mention to the banana cursor.

Footnotes

1. The default theme and icon set for GNOME.↩

2. AA is the dark version of the DMZ Vanilla cursor theme.↩