Hi everyone!
I’ve been having an issue since KDE Plasma 6.1. The screen turns black, but is apparently still showing the content I can interact with. I thought it was a KDE Neon problem, so I moved to Fedora 41, but it is still happening. This usually occurs when the Laptop battery goes down around 50%, and the solution I’ve been using is to connect my Laptop to the power outlet, close the laptop lid and open it again, after doing that it works normally.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue?
Did you try to just increase the screen luminosity with your laptop keyboard keys? Most laptops have such keys:
I tried it, but it didn’t work. The only solution that have worked was the one I mentioned.
These are my battery power settings.
A. how can you tell that the laptop is still interactive?
B. If you try to activate a text virtual terminal using CTRL+ALT+F3 - do you see a screen with text? (use CTRL+ALT+F2 to get back to your GUI virtual terminal).
On the face of it - this sound like a hardware issue, that possibly get triggered by the software doing something new.
I can switch between virtual terminals, but when I go back to the GUI the screen is still black. Even, I tried to restart the Plasma desktop service from a virtual terminal and it didn’t work. I do not think it’s due to a hardware problem.
If the problem starts happening when battery goes below 50%, and there is no 50% configuration in the power management, then it is either hardware, or some non-KDE software that is doing something funky.
If the screen is only black in the GUI VT, then it is likely a software issue.
Can you check if you have a directory in /sys/class/backlight that has a file called brightness in it?
If so - can you check what it says when you are in the GUI and the screen is black? For example, I would try to run this in a text VT - while true; do sleep 3; cat /sys/class/backlight/*/brightness; done - and then switch to the GUI VT, wait some seconds and then switch back and examine the output. If at some point the output shows a very low value, but not when you are on a text VT, that would be an indication that some software is doing something annoying (good values are device specific, check the max_brightness file to have an idea of what may be considered “low”).
I’ve just tried it. The values are the same than when is working normally.
/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness
9857
/sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/max_brightness
39425
I better check whether there is some software causing this problem.
When the screen is black, brightness is still set at around 30%? It could be a kwin issue.
I haven’t had that problem for a few months now.