Screen flickering after last December update of KDE Neon (user edition)

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1

Updated KDE Neon earlier via Discover, and after reboot I noticed quite a bit of screen flickering. It was fine before the update. I looked through various articles on here but these didnt help.
Anybody experiencing this issue and/or can offer help. It would be greatly appreviated. Thanks.

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Hi! Just checking, have you already tested to see if changing “Adaptive sync” settings in System Settings > Display & Monitor affects that issue at all?

To help folks guide you best, can you also please paste the details from the Info Center app into a message?

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image1027Ă—232 31.4 KB

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Thanks for your reply, appreciate it. Apologies for not including the system info details in my first message (I am a new user, in the process of getting away from Windows as MS decided that my CPU isn’t good enough for Win-11 lol). Here are the details:

Operating System: KDE neon 6.2
KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.4
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.9.0
Qt Version: 6.8.1
Kernel Version: 6.8.0-51-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 Ă— AMD Ryzen 5 2500U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx
Memory: 6.7 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon Vega 8 Graphics
Manufacturer: Acer
Product Name: Aspire A315-41
System Version: V1.18

I have also checked System Settings > Display & Monitor, however, I do not have a setting called “Adaptive sync”, here’s is my Display configuration:

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image1328Ă—1012 151 KB

Does this help?

4

No worries, welcome aboard :slight_smile:

Hmm, well it doesn’t look like there are any wild settings in place on that display! Here are a few questions that may give a clue or help folks guide you further:

  • Does the flickering show up all the time, regardless of what you’re doing?

  • At what point during start-up do you first notice it - during the initial boot process with the OS loading (probably with an Acer logo displayed), at the login screen where you first type your password, or once you’re at the desktop after you’ve logged in?

  • Is it affected by what programs are open?

  • If you try recording your screen (for example, using Spectacle’s built-in screen recording), does the flickering show up in that recording?

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5

Thanks for your reply.

For some reason, the issue seems to have resolved itself. There have been a few further updates yesterday and today, although I am not sure if this resolved it.

  • After my initial experience with the flickering it did not occur again.
  • I thought about everything that I did on the day the issue occurred, and the only difference is that during my lunch break my display turned off after 30 minutes (as configured in the Power Management settings).
  • When I came back and moved my mouse, the screen turned on again and I had a notification about system updates waiting.
  • I performed the system update via Discover, the system restarted and I am pretty sure the flickering started after the restart.
  • I logged off and logged on again, no change, still flickering.
  • I then restarted my laptop, no flickering during boot-up but after logging on the screen (no matter what apps I was using) started to flicker again
  • I called it a day at that point and completely shut down my laptop
  • The next morning I booted up again, and there was NO flickering the whole day

It may have been resolved by the latest updates or there is some odd issue when you restart (instead of fully shutting down) the laptop after screen was turned off via Power Management that affects the screen.

For now it’s working, and I am grateful for that.

Again, thanks for your help and following up, really appreciate it :+1:

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Well, I’m glad it’s at least working now! For what it’s worth - and this is likely totally unrelated - I have a laptop for my part-time job that goes absolutely wonky with power management about half the time it wakes up from sleeping. Fans stuck on full blast, CPU levels mismatched to the load, all of it - and restarting never helps!

Only fully shutting down to a powered-off state, then booting back up, gets whatever is going wrong in the firmware back on the right track. Hopefully yours stays in a good spot for a good long while!

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Thanks, I hope so too :crossed_fingers: Laptop is only 5 years old and after I replaced the old drive with an SSD that now runs Neon, it feels like a brand new machine :blush:

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So a few days ago the screen flickering started up again and shutting down and turning my laptop again did not help. However, when I played around with the brightness settings I noticed that when I changed it to a lower value than 100%, e.g. 95%, the screen flickering stopped. Had it 95% for a few days and screen flickering did not occur again. I’ve probably jinxed it now :smiley: but will mark this as solution and close this thread.