Moving/floating desktop
 

Linux was working fine and I was getting the hang of it, then I obviously did something wrong because now when I move the cursor the desktop background moves too, a couple of inches in any direction that I move the cursor, as if the desktop is too big to fit on screen and therefore moves around in order to fit. I tried a "roll-back" and although I have several roll-backs on file I can't figure out how to apply them or 'mount' them as I believe it's called. (I can't figure out a lot of the jargon)

What DM are you using? IE.. KDE, XFCE, etc..

Also, what program did you use to create these "roll-backs"?

I've no idea what a DM is, and the rollbacks were listed in my System Snapshots but I don't know how to apply them, sorry, very limited knowledge in that area

Post the output of
That will tell what you are using, and where your graphics are set to.

xorg can be set to do that. Do you have a xorg.conf? Or are you using wayland.
If so then post it.

What distribution are you using, what window manager or desktop environment?

Can you tell me how much to paint my truck ? It's a Ford
Sorry for the Debian kinda response(not really)
C'mon man. Whatcha running ?
Laptop ?
Mac ?
Ubuntu ? What flavor ? Mint ? Pops? XFCE ?

Oops, sorry, my operating system is Mint 19 Cinnamon 64 on a desktop. Next I'll try the code which teckk suggests, back shortly. Oh and the graphics card is an MSI Geforce GTX 750ti, Windows runs fine and so did Linux until I obviously did something wrong. (I've never used code before, as I said I'm a total newbie)

Yikes, here goes, teckk's code brings this up =

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DVI-D-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-0 connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 509mm x 286mm
1920x1080 60.00*+ 60.00 59.94 50.00 50.00 29.97 23.98 60.05 60.00 50.04
1680x1050 59.95
1600x900 60.00
1440x900 59.89
1400x1050 59.98
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1280x800 59.81
1280x720 60.00 60.00 59.94 50.00
1152x864 75.00
1024x768 75.03 70.07 60.00
800x600 75.00 60.32
720x576 50.00
720x480 59.94
640x480 75.00 59.94
mike@mike-System-Product-Name:~$ uname -a
Linux mike-System-Product-Name 4.15.0-140-generic #144-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 19 14:12:35 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
mike@mike-System-Product-Name:~$ lspci -k

You left off the output from the quoted command.

Please also provide the input/output from the second of the two lines following:Whenever you provide any command output here, please surround your paste using code tags around your paste.

DE is desktop environment, in your case, Cinnamon.

I suspect what happened is you enabled a special usability feature that scrolls the whole desktop. What that might be I can't say since I don't use Cinnamon. You might find a way to toggle this behavior off via a right click menu on an open area of the desktop, or from a desktop settings function in Cinnamon's main menu.

Agreed. I'm thinking it might be a sort of "zoom/magnify desktop" effect that the OP has accidentally turned on? KDE has this desktop effect but I had trouble getting it to work until I redefined the zoom in/out keys---Cinnamon might make this effect easier to trigger. When zoomed, my desktop behaves the way the OP described.

Thanks mrmazda and rnturn, that was the problem, I'd messed with the zoom settings. Shame I only found out after I'd formatted the disk and installed a more recent version of Ubuntu, meaning I had to reinstall all my favourite programmes. Linux is fun but it's a steep learning curve and maybe I'm a slow learner. Regards, Mike

Far less so for persons new to computers. If a person has never used a computer Linux will generally be easier but if someone has been usi g some other OS like windows, they are very different in a number of ways and the person needs to first 'unlearn' the windows ways and then learn Linux. Most of us have been in that positiion. Learning Linux just requires the ability to read and the willingness to put in the time. Good luck with it.