Last week I received my DIY 12th gen Framework laptop. It runs like a charm and I’m very happy with it. However, I’ve noticed that when I turn the nightlight on and off, the top of the display flickers white for a bit. I may also have noticed some freezing, though it is not as apparent. It may be related to this topic on Fedora or this topic on Pop!_OS
I have the DIY laptop, I put in my own 1TB SN 850 NVMe and 2 Crucial SODIMM DDR4-3200 16GB and installed Arch linux on it with the Gnome DE. As of today, I’m running kernel 6.0.11, but the current behaviour was also present before the update, and it was still present after the update. As per the other posts I mentioned, I tried the 5.15.81-1 LTS kernel. It doesn’t seem to have the white flicker on the top of the display when I turn the nightlight on or off. However, it also doesn’t seem to have a working nightlight. On the 6.0.11 kernel it doesn’t matter whether I’m running a Wayland or an Xorg session: in both cases the nightlight causes a white flicker for a few seconds. This, however, only happens on the internal display of the Framework laptop. I don’t have this issue on my external monitor.
Since I didn’t get any results when searching on this forum for the nightlight, I wondering if this is related to the other posts I mentioned, or something different. I’m also not sure whether it’s a hardware or software issue - although it seems to be software related.
Does anyone have the same problem? An any ideas for solving this?
I haven’t experienced this on Fedora or Ubuntu. The flickering.
First thing I’d do is test another distro as to rule out hardware. Live usb of Ubuntu for example. 22.10 has the night light feature. If it doesn’t flicker there then we know this is a matter of kernel/video driver.
Thanks for your response. I’ve tested both Fedora 37 and Ubuntu 22.10 from a USB. I was not able to reproduce the white flickering at the top edge of the display. However, neither OSes had a decently functioning night light. In both Ubuntu (kernel 5.19.0-21) and Fedora (kernel 6.0.7-301) the night light toggle of the shell didn’t result in a more red display. When going to the night light setting through settings, it was turned on, however. Only upon sliding the amount of redness, it would become more red. But upon turning it off and on again, the nigh light would not turn on again.
This is to say that I’m not entirely sure this test ruled out any hardware issues. Please note that the issue came to my attention because night light was turned on by default on my Arch install in the evening, which meant that after logging in, I had a brief flicker at the edge of the top of the screen. As opposed to the live usbs of both Fedora and Ubuntu, night light is otherwise working as it is supposed to on Arch.
As I am writing this, I was toggeling the night light switch a few times. Just because I was making sure it worked here as it should. After flickering several times upon toggling on and off, the behaviour has now disappeared. I no longer get the flicker. I’ll see what happens in the coming days, for example after a reboot, and report back.
In my previous post I mentioned that after toggling the night light switch several times, my flickering disappeared. This may have been because Gnome Extensions crashed and disabled. I noticed that my extensions were turned off. I enabled them again, rebooted. The flickering had come back. Then I disabled the extensions again, and the flickering at the top upon enabling/disabling night light disappeared again. I then enabled Gnome extensions again and disabled them all individually. Next I re-enabled them individually again, each time checking whether the flickering at the edge appeared again.
For now it seems that it reappeared after enabling the User Themes extension. Nonetheless, currently I’m not able to reproduce. For not it has disappeared. However, I think it’s very likely that the flickering at the edge is somehow caused by one or more of the extensions. This means it’s likely not a hardware issue and that it’s fixeable or at least avoidable.
That’s all for now, should I found out more, I’ll update here.
This indicates this is software and toggling the extensions off and on indicate that this extension related which is super common. Please do keep us posted.
It’s been a while, I havent had the issue since. I disabled the user themes extension and no longer used my custom shell theme which made the top shell bar grey instead of black.
I get mail notifications, so happy to help if I can! But my framework has been running like a charm on Arch since solving this issue, so no need to be on these forums much
