Hi All,
After a recent upgrade from 15.3 to 15.4, I notice that a standard desktop session now lives on Virtual Terminal 2, rather than 7, as discussed in lists.opensuse.org.
But there is a weird thing:
If I switch from the desktop to the console on VT 1 (Ctrl-Alt-F1), and then back to the desktop (Ctrl-Alt-F2), the screen is corrupted; ditto if I go to any other screen that has a console login prompt on it (VT 3 to VT 6) and then attempt to go back to VT 2. However, switching to VT 7, I see a black screen with a mouse pointer on it that actually moves with the mouse. Moreover, switching directly from VT 7 to VT 2, there is no screen corruption!
What is going on here? Is there an X-server actually running on terminal 7 as well as terminal 2? And does that X-server issue the correct command to the monitors to set the line frequency, or whatever it is that’s wrong when going directly from any other terminal to terminal 2?
I never had any love for SDDM, and even less since it followed GDM off of tty7. I run mc on tty2. So, I no longer have any 15.4/Plasma installations using SDDM, and can’t try to reproduce, and neither on 15.5. Instead, I use any of the same DMs as I use with TDE and KDE3: XDM, TDM or KDM3. If you have any interest in having the old behavior back, you might wish to make a switch, as all three still run on tty7 (I think - I’m not entirely sure about XDM).
Note you only have a very few weeks of support left for 15.4, so you might want to go ahead and upgrade to 15.5.
It’s possible that you could change the behavior (eliminate corruption) with a display driver switch. You have two competent choices: 1-radeon; 2-modesetting. Try switching. This elaborates.
Something else to check with your GPU is to make sure it’s using crocus dri rather than i965. Check it using xdriinfo. Which dri is in use is also part of inxi -Ga output.
Note you only have a very few weeks of support left for 15.4, so you might want to go ahead and upgrade to 15.5.
I installed 15.4 as a pathway from 15.3 to 15.5 (they say you can’t do a direct upgrade).
In the meantime, on a separate partition, I also installed 15.5 from scratch, i.e. as it comes out of the box, rather than as an upgrade. It does not show the same problem, and interestingly, has the desktop session on VT 7 again, like it used to be. I am therefore not particularly worried about the problem in 15,4 any more. I am going to re-configure the 15.5 to my liking, and copy (or link) across the personal data. I do that every few iterations of the OS to clean out accumulated debris.