When booting, white lines ‘grow’ out vertically from lit elements on screen. See below for pics and videos.
When on and logged in, the entire display has horizontal lines, like scanlines on a TV. Vertical artifacts ‘grow’ in the black sections of the scanlines, responding to things like the mouse cursor or other elements of high contrast.
Boot elements grow faster and in a different way, perhaps because they’re much brighter, or higher contrast. See video for a demo of how it behaves. Sometimes the lines are red, sometimes white, sometimes an in between colour like yellow, depending seemingly on randomness or what’s going on with the cable. After removing the bezel and reseating the cable, it went from white to red artifacts.
FYI I’m on Fedora Workstation 41 KDE edition.
POSSIBLE CAUSES:
This all began when I updated to kernel 6.13. (For the longest time I was on kernel 6.5.6 because anything newer would cause mouse issues, at some point I accidentally went up to that kernel and am now basically staying on it, and yes, it does still cause mouse issues. That’s not what this is about)
Some have said this looks like LCD failure. But since all pixels still work, and the artifacts that ‘grow’ disappear every time I disable the display, it could be a software issue, or an issue with the cable. Some suggested it’s an issue with the cable. I have unplugged and re-plugged the connector gently, no difference.
To help rule out hardware vs. software issue, I would suggest making an Ubuntu USB and booting to a LIVE environment. If the issue persists then there is something likely hardware related. If it is only on Fedora then something with the drivers/kernel would have to be causing the issue.
Scanlines like what would appear on older tube computer monitors was typically the result of bad driving frequencies from the video device. Once the frequencies and polarities are in the range of what the monitor can handle it then displayed the picture correctly.
The artifacts exist during the BIOS update menu, the splash screen when booting, the kernel selection menu (GRUB?) and the UEFI firmware menu when I went to select the live disk. I wasn’t able to boot into either of my ventoy drives, both for different error reasons.
But since the artifacts exist where they do, I figure this is hardware/firmware.
Uh oh. That is likely a hardware issue then. There are two (2) ends to the video cable. The easy access part is the connection to the mainboard. The other end is behind the display. It is possible the display cable may have worked its way loose over time? or possibly the cable has a wire that has gone bad. You could try carefully removing the display and reseating the cable and seeing if that changes anything.
Framework support said this is a hardware issue and the display needs replacing.
This was after a reasonably quick back-and-forth with support after creating a ticket, providing additional information for verification and to explain the issue. Specifically they said “After a thorough review of this issue and of the submitted photos/ videos, we’ve come to the conclusion that there is a need to replace the Display Kit.” They went ahead and offered to send a replacement, then went ‘wait, no, you’re outside of warranty now, sorry can’t do anything.’
Overall, the support itself was good, the fact the warranty only applies for one year was a disappointment. It’s normal in the tech industry, but from a company like Framework, I expected better.
So for anyone else having this issue: it is probably the display itself. Submit a support ticket either way to confirm. Looks like I’m gonna be buying a new display.
