Reproduced this issue on Framework 12 running both Debian Trixie and Fedora 42 as well. Same fix as you mention (shutting lid and opening again) resolves it temporarily.
Emailed support and they asked me to try a third OS (ubuntu) but seeing this thread and people having same issue on Ubuntu seems like a lot of work for little use.
However I am not seeing this issue on Fedora OR arch (running wayland/niri) on my Framework 13.
Maybe thread should be renamed/tagged to reflect that the issue is also in the officially supported distributions.
I get flickering lines on my display. It flickers a couple of times per minute, so really distracting. I get this on Ubuntu 25.04 and on latest Bluefin. I’m in touch with support, but no solution so far.
Jumping in (as you can see by my lack of username this is my first forum post), to confirm I also have this problem on fedora 42 with my framework 12. I really hope framework looks into this as one of my main use cases is using the 12 for watching movies and the flickering hurts my eyes and makes content look awful. It even persists on a restart of the computer, and the screen close fix doesn’t work for me
Having the exact same issue on my batch 9 Framework 12.
That said, I’m pretty confident this is a software issue. The flickering is absolutely chaotic on the installed system (NixOS 25.11, Linux 6.16.7, KDE Plasma 6.4.5 on Wayland), but there’s no flickering at all on a live USB of NixOS (NixOS 25.11, Linux 6.16.6, KDE Plasma 6.4.5 on Wayland).
I’ve checked the kernel modules, and the installed system has more modules than the live USB. Notably, the Framework module is only present in the installed system. Could this be an issue with Framework’s own drivers?
Edit: Removing framework_laptop did nothing. I did discover that the flickering stops if you touch and hold the display. I can disable the touchscreen and use the laptop with minimal flickering, but as soon as the touch event stops, it starts flickering again.
The issue is almost certainly related to i915. Booting with nomodeset fixes it, and it seems like the xe driver is otherwise unused. OP mentioned they tried both i915 and xe, but I think what actually happened is that they tried i915 + xe, which would still use i915. The display wouldn’t be hardware-accelerated without that driver.
This is most likely Intel’s fault, but Framework should probably investigate this, especially since it also affects Windows. (to a lesser extent)
Edit: Unfortunately, it seems like this limited celebration was itself premature. nomodeset does not fix it, but significantly reduces the flickering. (to acceptable levels)
Tested some more operating systems. Fedora 42 KDE is affected in the exact same way as NixOS. Ubuntu 25.04 seems fine, but it was using GNOME instead of KDE.
I briefly installed Windows, but didn’t want the hassle of installing the Wi-Fi drivers manually to install the graphical drivers, so it was effectively the same as running Linux with nomodeset.
Okay, I think I found another piece of the puzzle (maybe). I tried Kubuntu 25.04, and it was fine, up until I followed the Framework completion guide and ran the sed commands to fix the iio-buffer-accel udev rule. As soon as tablet mode was detected, the screen started flickering, just like Fedora and NixOS.
Edit: oooor, maybe not, since deleting the file in /etc/udev/rules.d did not stop the flickering, even after a reboot. Maybe it was some other software package that was updated. At least this gives us a range to bisect: the bug is between the versions of the packages in the Kubuntu ISO and the newest updates as of today.
