Fullscreen Causes Flickering and Glitches in OBS and Discord Capture

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1

Discord screensharing and OBS capture flicker or glitch whenever I fullscreen any application, game or even just a YouTube video.
I don’t see any flicker on my display, the issue only appears in the capture+preview, and the app GPU Screen Recorder isn’t affected.

I left a small OBS window visible on the side, even the preview flickers, and Discord behaves the same way.

Videos:

here’s my fastfetch

davekai@fedora:~$ fastfetch 
             .',;::::;,'.                 davekai@fedora
         .';:cccccccccccc:;,.             --------------
      .;cccccccccccccccccccccc;.          OS: Fedora Linux 43 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
    .:cccccccccccccccccccccccccc:.        Host: MS-7C56 (1.0)
  .;ccccccccccccc;.:dddl:.;ccccccc;.      Kernel: Linux 6.18.8-200.fc43.x86_64
 .:ccccccccccccc;OWMKOOXMWd;ccccccc:.     Uptime: 3 hours, 44 mins
.:ccccccccccccc;KMMc;cc;xMMc;ccccccc:.    Packages: 2640 (rpm), 42 (flatpak)
,cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cc;;WW:;cccccccc,    Shell: bash 5.3.0
:cccccccccccccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc:    Display (Microstep 25"): 1920x1080 in 25", 200 Hz [External] *
:ccccccc;oxOOOo;MMM000k.;cccccccccccc:    Display (HP LA2306): 1920x1080 in 23", 60 Hz [External]
cccccc;0MMKxdd:;MMMkddc.;cccccccccccc;    DE: GNOME 49.3
ccccc;XMO';cccc;MMM.;cccccccccccccccc'    WM: Mutter (Wayland)
ccccc;MMo;ccccc;MMW.;ccccccccccccccc;     WM Theme: davekai
ccccc;0MNc.ccc.xMMd;ccccccccccccccc;      Theme: adw-gtk3-dark [GTK2/3/4]
cccccc;dNMWXXXWM0:;cccccccccccccc:,       Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
cccccccc;.:odl:.;cccccccccccccc:,.        Font: Inter (10.5pt) [GTK2/3/4]
ccccccccccccccccccccccccccccc:'.          Cursor: macOS (22px)
:ccccccccccccccccccccccc:;,..             Terminal: Ptyxis 49.2
 ':cccccccccccccccc::;,.                  Terminal Font: JetBrains Mono (11pt)
                                          CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X (16) @ 4.67 GHz
                                          GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 [Discrete]
                                          Memory: 7.45 GiB / 15.53 GiB (48%)


davekai@fedora:~$ nvidia-smi
Tue Feb 10 14:52:39 2026       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.119.02             Driver Version: 580.119.02     CUDA Version: 13.0     |

How I installed the driver/codecs/cuda

2

The exact same thing happens to me, and I don’t understand why. Out of nowhere, OBS started doing this only in applications with active full screen. I don’t know if anyone knows the solution, but I hope that in this forum, I will receive notifications of this post when someone replies. Thank you for reporting this in such detail and letting me know that I’m not the only one!

3

OBS relies entirely on the PipeWire infrastructure. KWin triggers a direct scanout when an application goes fullscreen, bypassing the image buffer that feeds PipeWire. Why? That feature boosts performance output for a small amount in game.

First try borderless fullscreen and record again if it doesn’t work here is the next possible solution:

mkdir -p ~/.config/environment.d && echo "export KWIN_DRM_NO_DIRECT_SCANOUT=1" >> ~/.config/environment.d/kwin.conf

Do not forget to reboot your system.

We try to disable KWin Direct Scanout to prevent it to cause flickering while recording. That should help.

Try it and if it doesn’t work you can simply just cancel the change we made by using this command:

rm ~/.config/environment.d/kwin.conf
4

Hello! Today I noticed that I have the same issue: when recording using Screen Capture (PipeWire), the screen starts flickering and artifacts appear. I thought it might be a conflict with Vulkan Capture, but then I came across this thread. I hope this issue will be resolved soon.
Video:

5

Hey! The other day I kept trying different solutions but nothing solved it, sometimes after rebooting, it works for like 2-3 minutes and breaks again randomly, from what I’ve seen it goes out of sync of something, because it flickers previous/old frames on new frames on the first half of the screen. the temporary solution was to switch to KDE Plasma, I think it’s not a fedora problem but a GNOME/Mutter problem. I remember like 1 or 2 years ago trying linux, I had the exact same problem even on different distors (Arch and Ubuntu), after nearly 2 years no progress so far for some reason. but yeah the temporary solution for now is to just switch to KDE, because they have proper a implementation for this. So far I haven’t seen any flickers while capturing using KDE. And also for some reason regardless if it’s using cpu or gpu for encoding, it just flickers regardless at least from my experience.

6

From my experience, I had 0 problems with KDE/Kwin in regards to anything related to screen capture, only GNOME/Mutter