Anyone else get flickering desktop backgrounds and windows periodically on NVIDIA cards in Cinnamon?

[Yfrwlf]

Smells like a driver issue or some sort of problem with Muffin + NVIDIA drivers, but every now and then, very rarely, will I get the background turning black and/or flickering, and sometimes various windows will do this as well. It's very rare as I said, and moving the mouse will get it to go away. Anyone else seen this?

[Spearmint2]

add nvidia-settings using the Package Manager. Here's what it does.

"The nvidia-settings utility is a tool for configuring the NVIDIA
Linux graphics driver. It operates by communicating with the NVIDIA
X driver, querying and updating state as appropriate. This
communication is done with the NV-CONTROL X extension.

Values such as brightness and gamma, XVideo attributes, temperature,
and OpenGL settings can be queried and configured via nvidia-settings."

[Yfrwlf]

I guess that was a bot response? Either way it's spam and has nothing to do with windows rarely and randomly flickering black in Cinnamon.

[JosephM]

This is a known issue. Myself and another of the devs have seen this happen. The problem with trying to fix it is that it happens rarely and seemingly at random. I also have only seen this on my machine with the Nvidia driver and not my intel graphics machine.

[Yfrwlf]

This is a known issue. Myself and another of the devs have seen this happen. The problem with trying to fix it is that it happens rarely and seemingly at random. I also have only seen this on my machine with the Nvidia driver and not my intel graphics machine.

Thanks for the confirmation. That would seem to make it more likely that it's a problem with the NVIDIA driver than with Muffin/Cinnamon, but the issue may still have been resolved in newer versions of Muffin, or in Mutter. Ubuntu is using Mutter with the GNOME Shell in 17.10, so I'm curious to see if there is any flickering there or not, but that'd mean running Ubuntu and Gnome instead of Mint and Cinnamon. Ew!

[Spearmint2]

I guess that was a bot response? Either way it's spam and has nothing to do with windows rarely and randomly flickering black in Cinnamon.

No, that's the read file for it from Package Manager. I doubt it would qualify then as "spam". Sorry if it offended you for some inexplicable reason.

[Yfrwlf]

I guess that was a bot response? Either way it's spam and has nothing to do with windows rarely and randomly flickering black in Cinnamon.

No, that's the read file for it from Package Manager. I doubt it would qualify then as "spam". Sorry if it offended you for some inexplicable reason.

I'm pointing out that nvidia-settings has nothing to do with this bug, so I have no clue why that info is relevant, and thus spam for this particular thread topic? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Oldbwl]

I have experienced this issue three or four times since 18.3. I run dual monitors and it only occurs on the secondary, and especially when Firefox Q is running.

[Pepi]

I've never seen it with my NVIDIA desktop running 18.3 Cinnamon?

[Perette]

I am getting flickering under Mint 19.

- My machine has an Nvidia and an Intel graphics card, with the *Intel* active.
- I didn't have this issue under Mint 18.3.
- It only happens on the secondary monitor.
- The primary monitor's contents to affect it. For example, with a Firefox window open on the primary, the secondary doesn't flicker as much.
- Terminal seems good for triggering flicker, although I've seen it with other applications too.
- With the primary monitor empty of windows (or minimized), two terminals open on the secondary, overlapping so there's some compositing going on, mousing over/in & out of windows triggers the black box flickers around the partially-buried windows reliably.

[Yfrwlf]

I am getting flickering under Mint 19.

- My machine has an Nvidia and an Intel graphics card, with the *Intel* active.
- I didn't have this issue under Mint 18.3.
- It only happens on the secondary monitor.
- The primary monitor's contents to affect it. For example, with a Firefox window open on the primary, the secondary doesn't flicker as much.
- Terminal seems good for triggering flicker, although I've seen it with other applications too.
- With the primary monitor empty of windows (or minimized), two terminals open on the secondary, overlapping so there's some compositing going on, mousing over/in & out of windows triggers the black box flickers around the partially-buried windows reliably.

Wondering if AMD users have this happen with their open source driver. Maybe this is a bug in the proprietary NVIDIA driver. If Ubuntu's DE doesn't have any issue I wonder how they're doing it differently.

[lsemmens]

I've been running 18.3 on my server with AMD and nVidia card on a dual setup (monitor ad TV) and have not noticed it. I upgraded to Mint 19 only last night, so shall be vigilant.

[catweazel]

Smells like a driver issue or some sort of problem with Muffin + NVIDIA drivers, but every now and then, very rarely, will I get the background turning black and/or flickering, and sometimes various windows will do this as well. It's very rare as I said, and moving the mouse will get it to go away. Anyone else seen this?

This an nVidia bug. You probably see things like this flashing madly:

Code: Select all

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa --yes
sudo apt update

You need the latest nVidia driver, version 396, I think. Once you've added the PPA and updated apt, run driver manager and select it to be installed.

[catweazel]

I have experienced this issue three or four times since 18.3. I run dual monitors and it only occurs on the secondary, and especially when Firefox Q is running.

See my response to the OP, above.

[JosephM]

So, a bit more info. I've now seen this issue with the nvidia driver with Cinnamon on Mint18.3, Mint19, and with Gnome shell on Ubuntu 18.04. It also happens on a range of drivers including the 396 drivers that someone above says fixes it. It can sometimes just happen few and far between.

[Perette]

There's some additional screwy behavior dealing with backgrounds. When the background periodically using a crossfade, the secondary monitor starts flickering, switching between a couple of cross-faded frames rather than moving all the way to the new one. Moving the mouse to that screen and clicking on the background it corrects the behavior. There is a similar misbehavior when using the background preference application.

lspci reports the device as:

01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM107M [GeForce GTX 950M] (rev a2)
Subsystem: Lenovo GM107M [GeForce GTX 950M]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 255
[snip]
Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia

Using driver manager to switch back to the Nouveau open-source driver seems to resolve the issue.

[rojthevorlon]

Nvudia card here. Same problem iterated in original post here coupled with multiple freezes per day using Cinnamon Zoom. Logout / login would get rid of flickering temporarily. Freezes from zoom required hard reboot. Posted this problem here - no takers.

Gave up, reformatted and went back to rock solid 18.3. Maybe after 19.1 release I’ll think about upgrading again.

Maybe.

[Perette]

Updated Nvidia driver to 396 per catweazel's suggestion, but still saw both background flicker when I launched the background preference pane and switched background selections, and got the black boxes around windows when active windows changed. Both behaviors limited to second monitor only, with prime-select in Intel mode as before.

When I prime-selected back to Nvidia mode, the problem went away. Then, switched back to Intel mode... and the problem stayed away. It does not put me at ease that jiggling the handle is the solution, but I'll live with it unless trouble shows up again.

[jodel]

I am using the Nouveau Driver and have the exact same effect. Black Boxes randomly appearing on the second screen and being really annoying and flickering. GTK CSS fix applied but did not work.

As I use the Nouveau Driver and _not_ the NVIDIA driver, I daresay it's nothing to do with the NVIDIA driver but with a second monitor setup in Linux Mint 19.

This didn't happen to me in Linux Mint 18.

[bassplayer]

Mint 19 here with the following:

Code: Select all

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF116 [GeForce GTX 550 Ti] (rev a1)

Never experienced the issue OP is having. Must be I'm using an older card.

I'm using the nvidia 390.77 driver.