If I turn my monitor off while my PC is on and turn it back on again it never gets a signal back

Ask Fedora
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1

While my PC is on in Fedora 43 desktop, if I switch my monitor off and then back on again, my monitor never gets a signal back and eventually powers down. The only way I have found to resolve this is to turn the monitor on and press Ctrl+Alt+F1. This isn’t ideal as this makes me log back in and I deliberately turn off screen locking permanently in the settings. Any ideas why my monitor doesn’t get a signal in this scenario? This is Gnome specific because I tried Fedora 43 KDE and it is doesn’t happen in that DE.

System details:

# System Details Report
---

## Report details
- **Date generated:**                              2025-11-15 14:30:47

## Hardware Information:
- **Hardware Model:**                              Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. MS-7E66
- **Memory:**                                      32.0 GiB
- **Processor:**                                   AMD Ryzen™ 5 9600X × 12
- **Graphics:**                                    AMD Radeon™ Graphics
- **Graphics 1:**                                  AMD Ryzen™ 5 9600X
- **Disk Capacity:**                               3.0 TB

## Software Information:
- **Firmware Version:**                            1.A26
- **OS Name:**                                     Fedora Linux 43 (Workstation Edition)
- **OS Build:**                                    (null)
- **OS Type:**                                     64-bit
- **GNOME Version:**                               49
- **Windowing System:**                            Wayland
- **Kernel Version:**                              Linux 6.17.7-300.fc43.x86_64

Monitor is a Dell G2724D

2

try switching back with Ctrl+Alt+F2 to your gnome session, unless the session has crashed.

3

But ctrl+alt+f1 seems to already be doing that. For the record, I didn’t know what ctrl+alt+f1 did - it was just a suggestion I found on the internet somewhere (I forget where now). So I turn my monitor off, turn it back on again, no signal. I then press ctrl+alt+f1 and it wakes my monitor up and immediately I see the graphical login screen and I can then enter my password and carry on.

I just looked up what ctrl+alt+f1 is supposed to do and it seems to be it takes you to a terminal screen. But this isn’t the case for me.

Edit: If I do press ctrl+alt+f1 and rather that login in that gui login screen I press ctrl+alt+f2 it does indeed just take me back to the screen as if I hadn’t turned my monitor off. That is still an inconvenience compared to just having to turn the monitor on.

4

f1 is the gdm screen
f2 is your gnome session if it’s still active.

so try again, switch to gdm wait for screen to appear and switch to f2 to see you gnome session.

suggestion: don’t turn off screen but use a timeout of 1 minute to put monitor into power-save state. You can use an extension like caffeine to keep monitor active.

1 Like
5

Thanks for helping. It still feels like a workaround rather than a proper solution but better than nothing. It’s just this doesn’t happen on the same machine with either KDE or Windows.

By the way, what is gdm?

6

yes, it’s a workaround.
Does this also happen if you turn monitor back on after a few minutes? Or only if you leave monitor off for a longer period?

7

Both. I can turn it off and only leave it a few seconds and it still does it.

8

This same issue is happening to me.

I have an RTX 4090, and I’m running the RPM Fusion for Fedora 43 Nonfree driver (580.105.08)

Connected through display port to a Corsair Xenon Flex 45WQHD240.

9

On the surface it doesn’t seem like that big a deal but it seems to have other consequences. For example, the only way I can get the screen to come back on is by pressing ctrl+alt+f1. However, this disconnects my bluetooth headphones which then require me to manully reconnect them. It’s lots of little inconveniences like that which add up into making this quite annoying.

1 Like
10

Adding some more info to this issue which is annoying me enough that I have tended to dual boot into Windows by default now.

On one occassion this morning when turning the monitor back on it did actually get a signal. However, this looked like a lock screen showing the time and date and then a message below saying something like click or press a key to login. Pressing the mouse or keyboard had no effect though and still required me to press ctrl+alt+f1. I assume this is still related in some way. Does it shed any light on the issue and how to fix it?

Also, if someone could actually explain what ctrl+alt+f1 does that would be great. I am doing it without even knowing what it does, why it works and if there are any potential downsides to doing it.

11

I’ve just resorted to unplugging the display cable and plugging it into a different port on my graphics card. Then the monitor wakes up.

Pretty sure this is a driver issue with wake/sleep in the kernel.