Screen turns black, everything goes unresponsive

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1

Little background story (read as mini-rant): I’m not sure what is going on lately with fedora, but problems just keep coming endlessly. I remember I had my computer working just fine one month ago, but lately when all these kernel updates were made, my computer is acting weird.

Now about the problem: I have my suspend set in the Gnome control center, to turn off my screen after 15mins, and put my computer into sleep mode after 30mins. However, when my screen goes off after 15mins, I’m basically locked out, moving my mouse, pressing keyboard buttons, pressing ctrl+alt+del nothing responds, and the screen never comes back, while at the same time my PC is still running in the background.

Anyone else experiencing similiar problems lately, like, since 2-3 days?

System Details Report

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  • Date generated: 2025-09-14 12:22:41

Hardware Information:

  • Hardware Model: MSI MS-7972
  • Memory: 16.0 GiB
  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-6500 × 4
  • Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
  • Disk Capacity: 3.5 TB

Software Information:

  • Firmware Version: C.D0
  • OS Name: Fedora Linux 42 (Workstation Edition)
  • OS Type: 64-bit
  • GNOME Version: 48
  • Windowing System: Wayland
  • Kernel Version: Linux 6.16.7-200.fc42.x86_64

Edit: just noticed, that someone also just opened a separate thread with similiar bug, I’m more and more suspecting bug with the latest kernel now… Graphical Issues on Wake-Up - #2 by setokaiba

Graphical Issues on Wake-Up
2

Does Ctrl-Alt-F3 work to get you into a TTY? If you can do that, it would be interesting to do journalctl from there and see if anything interesting is logged.

3

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately that didn’t work either. By the way, after I made my reboot via reisub, looking at the previous boot’s journalctl there’s nothing complaining about the issue, it’s really odd, it’s like these problems do not get even caught by the logger.

4

If you need REISUB, it is not surprising that journal entries don’t capture relevant details .

This history suggests a hardware issue such as overheating. Check for dust buildup on fans and heat sinks. The test for failing mass storage devices and RAM. Examine cables and connectors for signs of corrosion (green color).

Things to try after ruling out hardware issues that might help understand the problem:

  • update Fedora packages and vendor firmware so you aren’t chasing a solved problem
  • add a new user account and try to reproduce the issue there
  • remove non-essential external devices
5

In some ways your bug sounds a bit weirder than that. It’s not too uncommon to get issues on wake-up (for example my NVidia card on waking up will occasionally give me black screens or wrong resolutions - I’ve never been able to totally prevent that either on Windows or Linux.)

It’s more unusual that you get this error just from the screen being turned off, which you’d expect to be less impactful than the PC sleeping and waking.

6

The funniest part is that I’m probably the most paranoid person on Earth when it comes to keeping my computer clean, neat, and well-maintained. I constantly monitor temperatures to the point of obsession, with custom curves for both GPU and CPU, and neither ever goes above 35°C. It’s still the same now - otherwise, I’d get crazy from it. :smiley: My hardware is healthy, and under my constant checks on almost a daily basis, so hardware related is already isolated.

As for your todo list:

  • update Fedora packages and vendor firmware so you aren’t chasing a solved problem

check - same results

  • add a new user account and try to reproduce the issue there

check - same results

  • remove non-essential external devices

check - there’s no non-essential external device

The most interesting part about people constantly referencing Nvidia errors is that this problem only exists on Fedora and isn’t reproducible on any other distro. I’ve always experienced odd issues with Fedora, but during the 6.15 kernels everything worked seamlessly fine, until 6.16 came into the picture, when everything started to go downhill like house of cards. At this point, I have a strong feeling that the way Fedora patches their kernels doesn’t play well with one of my hardware components, while every other distro handles it with ease, even on the same kernel version. :person_shrugging: Anyways, thanks for the tips, guys. As hard as it is for me to accept my fate and leave my favorite GNOME supported distro, I already know the best solution for me is to call it a day and move forward to the distro my PC worked best with in the past: Mint.

7

To be clear, I wasn’t saying that your issue is Nvidia-related.

My Nvidia issues were just the first example that came to mind of my assertion that “sleep/wake is more impactful than the DE turning the screen off”. I could also have used the example that wireplumber-0.5.11 consistently broke my audio stack on sleep/wake.

8

Your system must be around 70 dogs-years old. I find dogs and computers both age at about the same rate, so you may well have hardware issues like failing capacitors on motherboard or the the PSU. It is, however, a fact of life that Linux developers generally have newish hardware, so there can be issues with older hardware that will only be addressed if some individual user takes them on.

Hope you find Mint is stable, but, given the history, would not be surprised if Mint also has issues.

I worked with a community of Linux users working in ocean remote sensing. Many members worked in developing nations where the way to get a linux system was to wait for the bosses to upgrade and check the closets for the cast-off older models. Nvidia graphics cards were common, and were certainly not without problems and needed patches that were often contributed by other linux users.

9

XDDDDDDDDD Bro :rofl: I mean, thank you for trying I guess.

So… you kind of skipped over the whole part where I already mentioned that the health of my hardware is under constant check, but y’know, that’s just totally fine. I mean, who am I kidding expecting people to actually read what I write, right… Oh and guess what? Installing kernel 6.14 moving back to Mint solved the issue. So yeah, definitely a hardware failure, right? /s

This is exactly what I dislike: people immediately jumping to “your hardware is dying” without even considering software first. It drives users into needless paranoia and often ends with them replacing perfectly good components. They spend real money, only to run into the same issues again, because the actual cause wasn’t hardware in the first place. Thankfully, I’m not the type who takes that kind of advice at face value. I hope you feel the weight of this, though I doubt.

What bothers me just as much is how quickly people jump on Nvidia as the culprit. In our household we have around 15 machines: some with Intel iGPUs, some AMD, and a few Nvidia cards. While AMD is often praised as “rock-solid” on Linux, my experience has been the opposite. The AMD rigs have been the most problematic, while Nvidia has given me relatively few issues :neutral_face: FYI.

So blanket statements like “it’s your hardware” or “it’s Nvidia” are not only unhelpful, they often mislead people. Troubleshooting should start with software, especially on Linux where kernels and drivers move fast and regressions are common.

Please do not spread misinformation about hardware remotely, without even seeing or inspecting it physically (even if you’re just brainstorming or guessing, it’s just not a game), because you can’t know how much mental stress people might experience from it.

If linux community keeps defaulting to “your hardware is bad,” then it’s just doing more harm than any good.

Peace :victory_hand:

Edit: 6.14 actually didn’t solve the fedora issue, installing the king :crown: Linux Mint did. Thanks for all the headaches - “fedora” “os” :broken_heart:

10

I’ve had the same “black screen, unresponsive PC on resume” issue on Fedora Kinoite from 10 Sep, which incidentally is running kernel 6.16.5 - I have had to revert to a previous deployment from 1 Sep, on kernel 6.16.3, which has another terrible regression of transient network disconnections which took me until today to diagnose (and 6.16.5 is supposed to have fixed). I’m using an AMD GPU by the way.

These 6.16 kernels are some of the buggiest I’ve ever seen. My choice is between broken network or broken suspend/resume. I’ll now try the latest Kinoite deployment in the off chance that all these issues have been fixed.

11

Thanks for your feedback. Yea I also have come to this conclusion, that kernels on fedora are just way too on the edge, and I had the worst times in the past month because of that, I guess Linus Torvalds already tearing their kernel developer team apart and soon we will see a funny mailing list yet again… :smiley:

Edit: holy crap, and I’ve just read that you’re even on AMD, the hardware where people claim that Linux experience is a breeze with - well yeah, I always knew the cake is a lie… Thank god for my blessed 6th senses, I didn’t switch from my Nvidia just because a few fellas lied about AMD on different platforms (reddit, forums etc). I don’t know why people keep doing this, what good is in there for them by saying false positives about hardware, its like literally stealing money for no benefits from people, and those people who actually believe to random strangers, will eventually leave linux community cause all they see are empty promises.

Since my last post, as I vowed to myself, I truly moved back to Linux Mint, where the latest kernel is 6.14.0-29-generic, and boy I had the most problem free / most chillax week already. I’m not to advertise this distro, but I start to appreciate being 2-3 or even 6 months behind, in favor for problemfree everyday usage and reliability. I had a more productive week since I moved away from fedora, I actually finally finished watching the first season of Futurama, continued improving on my foreign language skills, observed the stars (yepp, hobbyist astro guy here), and I already finished the first 5 campaign missions of one of my fave childhood game RoTWK - so I had a pretty busy week, where I traded in my valuable time for actual entertainment, and not troubleshooting (looking at u fedora….)

Overall, I truly wanted to believe in fedora, I gave it so many chances, so many reinstalls in the past years, but all these rogue kernel bugs are just a big nope to me. I don’t know what people are using their PC on, but in my case I need my PC to actually work and do it’s thing whenever I turn it on, and not waste my energy and time of troubleshooting it. fedora barely could fulfill this very big challenge, but I guess I asked too much from an OS - sarcasm. By the way, rumors say that once upon a time fedora was a very reliable, very reputable and stable system with quality background by red hat affiliate. What happened since then? :person_shrugging:

12

Can you downgrade the kernel though?

Moving to Mint seems rash. Well, moving to any Debian distro, thought admittedly I actually really like plain ol’ Debian (I don’t stray much from the upstreams), but I loathe apt. Passionately so. It’s so cumbersome, it gets me on my nerves.

This has happened twice to me recently and I dread I’m on the same boat. There’s RHEL but I’m not sure it will mount BTRFS volumes. Maybe it’s the gods of mount chichen..ea?-chinchen iztlan? whatever’s way of saying to stop putting off trying SUSE for once :joy: (which would be apt-less, right? :crossed_fingers:)

Chichen Itza? Arg–that’s gonna drive me insane all day.