On irregular intervals, my monitor gives a static noise effect (like old TV’s did) with big black squares moving in random patrons. Sometimes it happens 10 times a day, sometimes I didn’t see it for a week. It comes back often when the view is not moving much, so it only occurs when I write a text document, and not when I watch movies. Another pattern that I see is that it only happens after a long period in sleep mode. When I restart my system, it works normally. It happens in Fedora 35 and 36, in Wayland and X11.
The only thing I can do to stop the problem when it occurs, is unplugging the power from my display every ~15 minutes or restarting my computer. If I unplug HDMI it does nothing, the static noise stays for a moment. I can’t even see the internal monitor settings menu when it happens.
My first thought was that this was an error in my monitor (model: LG 34WN700 QHD Ultrawide 75Hz), but then I experienced a similar problem on my Full HD AOC monitor. It didn’t give a static noise effect, but the monitor keeps blacking out for a few seconds. It only occurs in Fedora. When I connect my laptop to the display (MacBook Air 2014 with macOS) I can use it without problems.
Then I thought that it has to be my graphics card (NVIDIA GTX 1660 super), but then I tested if the error occurred in Windows 10 on the same machine with the same graphics card, and it works just fine. So I reinstalled my whole Fedora Linux system (on another SSD), and it worked without problems for more than a month, but now the problem is back, and my screen gives static noise again… every 10 minutes.
I hope someone can give me suggestions on what I can do to debug this issue. What could it be: is it my graphics card that doesn’t work properly (in Fedora)? Is it an error in Gnome or Fedora itself? Or is it my monitor?
Are you using the nvidia drivers installed from rpmfusion or the default nouveau driver?
Is your system fully updated? sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
What program(s) are you using when this happens?
Are you using the default Wayland DM or are you using xorg/x11?
Most of those questions will be answered if you post the output of `inxi -Fzxx’ as preformatted text using copy&paste with the </> Preformatted text tags available on the tool bar above the input window.
My next suggestion would be to first run dnf distro-sync --refresh to make absolutely certain everything is fully up to date.
Then I would, unless you are in the habit of putting the system into hibernation, suggest that you consider disabling the physical swap to /dev/sda5. The inxi output shows 16GB RAM and very little swap usage. With 8GB swap in zram it is unlikely that the extra swap is needed, and it seems possible that having physical swap may interfere with the much faster swap with zram.
Swap has been discussed several times and the general consensus seems to have been that unless absolutely necessary using both physical and virtual swap is not best for performance. If you are not getting processes killed by the oomd then the extra swap is likely not needed.
