I’m a bit baffled.
I’ve a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 8th gen.
I’ve used it with Fedora Linux 34 and 35, and now I’m using Fedora Silverblue 35.
It has always worked very well.
Usually I use it connected to the Ethernet.
In the last days (vacation time!) I’ve mainly used it using a WiFi connection.
In the last days I noticed an annoying problem with the display. Artifacts, glitches, flickering, sorry I don’t know the right term. I can’t take a video, I can only upload some pics hoping that they give you an idea (please imagine them in motion).
I was already in despair because I booted with a live Fedora Workstation 35 (thus an older kernel and so on), and the problem was here as well. Ouch, an hardware problem. But oddly, no problem accessing the BIOS, running the health checks, or while on GRUB and on LUKS password spoke.
I observed that such annoying behavior was particularly noticeable using Firefox. The issue was additionally evident watching some online videos. Maybe something related to the browser? (Hardware acceleration and so on). No. Same issue with Chrome.
The display became practically unusable downloading an ISO using curl
. Yeah, these glitches/artifacts/flickers seemed to be increasing with an increased network activity.
So I had an idea. The WiFi access point is dual band. I was connected using 2.4 GHz. Mmmh, let’s try to connect to 5 GHz. And you know what? The issue has gone.
I then reconnected using the 2.4 GHz frequency band various times, to make a countercheck. And ta-da! the display problem has reappeared. Switched back to 5 GHz, the problem has gone.
Well. The question is: is it possible? Is it scientifically possible? How could WiFi frequency interfere in that way with the display? Should I expect that the problem is not that and the laptop actually has an hardware issue?