This issue isn’t limited to Whonix, as it occurs on a standard Linux Mint virtual machine. When I run the VM with the VirtIO display driver and enable OpenGL acceleration, the mouse cursor can become locked in a particular pointer mode (e.g., the “hand” or “text‑selection” icon) and won’t switch back to the normal arrow. It can also be inaccurate.
Using the QXL driver avoids the problem entirely, so the bug appears only with VirtIO + acceleration. I run it on SPICE, my host OS uses Wayland and I have an AMDGPU.
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Virtio graphics work well and should probably be preferred to QXL due to being more actively maintained, but OpenGL acceleration was very buggy in my testing. If you disable 3d acceleration, you will still get a well-performing desktop with Virtio.
Documented instability concerns and why one probably doesn’t need 3D acceleration here:
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That’s not accurate at all. Performance without acceleration is dreadful. While QXL performance is indeed usable, Virtio without OpenGL is not. Simply watching videos is a laggy mess, and CPU usage is excessively high.
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That hasn’t been my experience, but it may be hardware-dependent. If QXL works for you, good.
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It must be. I have pretty old DDR3 era hardware, but my GPU is new.
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