Hi, there is plenty of backstory I could toss in here, but the bottom line is that on my Acer Aspire 5 Thin laptop (AMD Ryzen 3 cpu and a Radeon gpu), every time I have my external monitor (An Acer Monitor as well, both it and my laptop’s monitor are set at 1920x1080 resolution) that is generally connected to this laptop, I have experienced some problems once I installed openSUSE XFCE on it. Most of those I’ve solved or hacked around, but one issue continues to plague me: my monitor goes blank every five minutes when it is left idle. It takes several seconds for the screen to return to normal, around 5 to 7.
Now, I at first thought it might be the power settings for the display (which for all I know, it is that), but I’ve only got it set for battery in the Power Manager and all those settings are set higher than 5 minutes (I timed it from the last time I did anything on the screen until it reset) and besides that, it generally stays plugged in and I have everything set for "never’ there. Additionally I tried it with the power management turned off–still did it. I’ve tried all sorts of things based on my research on the web from tuning off the compositor to unplugging the monitor from the laptop–the only thing that will work.
I’m still able to operate, but only because I solved a potentially related problem with a “hack” of sorts. But it may be a clue for someone to know what is going on. So I’ll include what happened with it and what I did to “solve” it. It has always had this problem from the time I installed OS as well. Every time I rebooted, or opened/turned on the monitor, or when it did reset, it would lose the prior settings I had and would default to a mirrored state. On the first install, it showed a “blank” box where you enabled mirrored displays in the display settings, and I couldn’t turn it off, except it would work if I drug the top screen off the other one. Still nothing changed in the check box. But it would of course only stay set for 5 minutes. Then it would blank out, and and everything I put in would change back to different resolution settings and become mirrored again. So the first thing I tried was I generally install without the external monitor plugged in but had forgot to disconnect it out, so I disconnected the monitor and reinstalled openSUSE. That at least allowed me to change the mirrored checkbox on and off, but it still did everything else. To make a long story shorter, I ended up solving the loss of settings by going to the advanced tab of the display settings, once I had things set up as I liked them, create a new profile, updated it, then turned on the top two switches dealing with “when a new monitor” is connected. So that effectively kept my settings in place through the various and sundry resets to my displays that I’m getting. Now the only problem I have is the occasional blanking of the screen every 5 minutes that I leave it idle. It doesn’t turn off any programs, my music will continue to play through the reset if I’m playing music. I’m, in fact using it now to type this.
RickC
Another factoid is, as far as I can recall, this is the first XFCE desktop I’ve ever run on this computer, so it could also be a driver conflicting somewhere with XFCE, which I’ve read has had a history of not playing nicely with external monitors.
So, am I destined to be stuck with a monitor that blanks out every five minutes when it is idle for as long as I have this distro on it, or does anyone have any ideas what could be causing this, and any potential fixes. Thanks for reading this post and any answers you may have. Let me know if you want me to provide anything more about my system, cli commands to run, etc.