This is normal if you are using Kali on VM. If you have installed it directly, you can activate the mouse alignment option in the settings

Thanks for the quick response. Please elaborate a bit.
At the moment I am running from a qemu qcow2 image (official download page) file which I modified afterwards, but I had the same issue with netinstall within a vm. In both cases, downgrading spice-vdagent solved it.
I can't find a "mouse alignment option" in settings. Does that always show regardless of pointer device selected? Tried with "QEMU USB Tablet" and "spice vdagent tablet". Could you please provide a screenshot?

[Deleted]

Hi,
​Thank you for the update. Since we are using different virtualization platforms (I am on VirtualBox while it seems you are using QEMU/KVM with qcow2 images), the "mouse alignment" settings are located in different menus.
​Here is a quick guide for the most common platforms to resolve this:
​1. QEMU / KVM (virt-manager)
​Since you are using SPICE, ensure the following:
​Input Device: Go to Details (lightbulb icon) > Add Hardware > Input. Add "EvTouch USB Graphics Tablet" or "Generic USB Tablet". This is the most effective way to sync the cursor.
​Display SPICE: Under the Video settings, ensure the pointer mode is set to Automatic.
​Agent: If you've already downgraded spice-vdagent and it works, it confirms a regression in the latest package.
​2. Oracle VirtualBox
​Settings > System > Motherboard: Change "Pointing Device" to USB Tablet.
​Input Menu: Ensure Mouse Integration is enabled (Host + I).
​3. VMware
​Preferences > Input: Set "Optimize mouse for games" to Never.
​Ensure USB Compatibility is set to 3.1 in VM settings.
​I hope this helps clarify where the settings are located for your specific setup. Let me know if you need any more details!
​Best regards.

By the way, if you have a problem, you can contact me on gmail.
Gmail: [email protected]

Thanks for the additional info. I agree this likely is a regression. The downgrade works for me at least, so I am fine for now. In general I believe it would be worthwhile to consider downgrading and pinning to spice-vdagent 0.22.1-4.1 for a while until this is solved. I reported the issue there as well.

The bug report seems this:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/spice/linux/vd_agent/-/work_items/47

Package itself seems to come directly from Debian, not sure if they (Kali Team) can do much about this:

https://pkg.kali.org/pkg/spice-vdagent

Thanks for opening a ticket upstream, and for pasting the link here.

From https://pkg.kali.org/pkg/spice-vdagent: I see that spice-vdagent 0.23.0-1 entered Kali rolling in on 2025-10-23, ie. 6 months ago.

@the_wolfman Are you certain that it broke after an update of spice-vdagent on your side? Ie. can you find it in the APT logs? It would mean that you updated a old system that wasn't update during the last 6 months - is that the case?

Otherwise, it's also possible that the regression was caused by another update, maybe kernel or xorg. I don't really know how it works under the hood so it's really wild guesses.

Hi @arnaudr,

this was not after an update. I discovered this issue with a fresh install using spice for the first time. I tried all the stuff I could remember from when I had seen this first time with other virtualization tools, to no avail. After some research and comparing it with debian bookworm and trixie vms which did not show the issue, I just had a hunch it might be related to spice-vdagent. So I installed version 0.22.1-4.1 from the debian bookworm repo just to find out. The issue disappeared. But of course the underlying reason might be something totally different and the issue is just surfacing this way.
Anyway, I reported it upstream already in order to make it known and maybe ring a bell with somebody.

I am not sure the kali team can or should actually try to fix it. But I wanted to raise a flag here and if others see this as well, it might be worthwhile to think about downgrading and pinning the version in kali until this is solved.

Thanks for the extra details. I'll try to troubleshot this further when I have time. Unfortunately this kind of things break fairly often, and there's only so much we can do...

No worries, you guys are doing a great job! I am ok with the wokaround and wanted to raise the flag here with my findings in case it makes sense in the bigger picture. Maybe its worth mentioning it in a wiki or the docu.