Random screen dimming in Fedora 42 Workstation

Ask Fedora
1

Fedora 42 has been running without issue for me except for one strange issue. After a variable amount of uptime, the screen goes dim suddenly (not blank, just quite dim), and nothing I can do will bring it back - I have to reboot. It might be 30 minutes of uptime, it might be 3 hours. This is not associated with any ‘period of inactivity’ - I am working away and poof the screen goes dim.

This is Fedora Workstation 42 on an HP desktop with Samsung monitor, Intel integrated graphics, etc. This does not happen in Debian (I dual boot). This did not happen with Fedora 41, or any previous version. Any insights/solution would be most welcome…

2

What is your Power Mode (can be checked in the Quick Settings menu)? If it is not Balanced, does it change if you switch to Balanced?

You can also have a look at tuned’s log file (usually in var/log/tuned/tuned.log), and check for warnings and errors around the time the screen dimming is happening.

journalctl might also reveal something.

3

Could this be something related to Gnome 48 new Digital Wellbeing feature? Try to disabled it from Settings / Wellbeing.

4

Power Mode had been set to Performance, so I’ve switched it to Balanced.

Yes, I shall have to go digging through the logs. I have some idea of what time to go looking for.

Thanks for the suggestions!

1 Like
5

Hmmm… could be something like that. I have turned off the Screen Time Limit, which was set for 8 hours. We’ll see what happens. It will be a while before I’ll be able to say anything definitive since the problem occurs so intermittently…

Thanks for the suggestion!