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Jittery Mouse in VMWare for Linux Guest

This was driving me crazy. My mouse was constantly flickering as I'd move it around the screen in my Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) guest. The VMWware help for this was also utterly useless: Install vmware-tools (really open-vm-tools). I finally came across some older posts on Linux forums saying that turning off “HWCursor” in xorg.conf did the trick and, spoiler alert, that worked.

The xorg.conf File

All you need to do is drop this file in /etc/X11/ and reboot (or restart X) and you should be good to go. If your distro ships with an xorg.conf (Ubuntu 20.04 does not), you can just add the “HWCursor” “Off” lines to your existing file.:

xorg.conf

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
        Option          "HWCursor" "Off"
EndSection
 
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "Configured Monitor"
EndSection
 
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Monitor         "Configured Monitor"
        Device          "Configured Video Device"
        Option          "HWCursor" "Off"
EndSection