Arch Linux

lna

Member

Registered: 2021-07-31

Posts: 26

SOLVED Applications stop displaying correctly / freeze after 5-10 mins

I recently upgraded my PC to a Dell XPS 9700 and immediately installed Arch (kernel 5.13.4-arch1-1). Everything is working out-of-the-box, which I'm very happy with.

One strange bug I am experiencing though is that after 5 - 10 mins of use in applications (alacritty, blender, firefox, signal-desktop, emacs, filezilla, etc.) the window would become unresponsive and display whatever the previous desktop's application was running.

I originally believed that it was a graphics issue as the PC has 2 GPUs but when running applications with prime-run the bug is still present. I have tried using dwm and xmonad running under xorg-server 1.20.12-1 but both produce the same result. The output of xorg's logs doesn't give any strange information when the issue occurs so I'm at a bit of a loss.

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Last edited by lna (2021-08-01 13:54:55)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,951

Re: SOLVED Applications stop displaying correctly / freeze after 5-10 mins

If you have xf86-video-intel installed, remove it.

lna

Member

Registered: 2021-07-31

Posts: 26

Re: SOLVED Applications stop displaying correctly / freeze after 5-10 mins

I do have xf86-video-intel installed so after removing it and rebooting xserver fails to start. I removed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf,d/20-video-intel.conf so that X11 would fall back on 20-video-nvidia.conf but xserver still fails to launch.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,951

Re: SOLVED Applications stop displaying correctly / freeze after 5-10 mins

Post the xorg log. Neither of these two files are things that should/would exist by default, what are their contents? What should happen is that xorg falls back to the built-in modesetting driver for the intel graphics card/general display.

Last edited by V1del (2021-08-01 11:09:59)

lna

Member

Registered: 2021-07-31

Posts: 26

Re: SOLVED Applications stop displaying correctly / freeze after 5-10 mins

Thanks for that pointer, I've removed both the xorg conf files and xserver now starts without errors, I will update after some use to see if this fixes the issue. I added these two files after following the nvidia optimus guide on the wiki

Last edited by lna (2021-08-01 13:55:55)

lna

Member

Registered: 2021-07-31

Posts: 26

Re: SOLVED Applications stop displaying correctly / freeze after 5-10 mins

That seems to have fixed the issue, thanks for your help!