Comment 24 for bug 1872870

So as a number of people have already observed, this bug is kind of a showstopper for many using Gnome's magnification feature on a regular basis, and it should definitely be fixed sooner rather than later.

However, looking at the behavior of the bug, I noticed there were no trails when the zoom feature was on and zoomed in. They're only present if the zoom setting is at 1.0 but the zoom feature is on. As a workaround, I wrote a small script that adds some logic to zooming in and out. If the feature is off and a zoom in is requested, the zoom is set to 2.0 and then the zoom feature is turned on. If a zoom out is requested and the updated magnification would be less than 2.0, i.e. fully zoomed out, the new magnification is set and then the feature is disabled. So, if you use the script to zoom in and out, you won't see trails, since the zoom feature will be disabled at max zoom.

The script can be found on GitHub here:

https://github.com/smythp/gnome-magnifier-mouse-trails-workaround

I've provided some usage guidance in the README and added some xbindkeys settings in another file that will replicate the default Gnome zoom in and out shortcuts. I haven't tested it extensively, feel free to contribute or open an issue, though no promises as to quality here.