Desktop Randomly Going black and coming back after a few days

My desktop behaves weirdly after having the system on for a few days.

Behavior:
Screen goes black with only cursor remaining on screen for a few seconds, then my desktop reappears, repeat.

It usually happens when I wake the system from sleep, or when I open musescore in particular.

Is there any way around this other than to reboot my system regularly?

Specs:
Ryzen 7 5800X, 32GB Ram, RTX3070TI, Seasonic GX850 Power supply, Linux Mint 21.3 with Cinnamon Desktop
Displays:
3x Samsung Viewfinity S6 2560x1440 (Using fractional scaling at 125%)

Is the system running stock or you’re using any different setting like CO curve or XMP? If so I’d turn those off and see what happens. Usually low load issues with Ryzen CPUs stem from those settings not being stable enough, even if they were stable in the past.

I would start with the basics first.

  1. Make sure cables are all properly seated nothing looks loose etc.
  2. Update drivers, firmware, BIOS.
  3. Verify Linux is up to date.
  4. From there I’d look at logs during the time of the event and use that to narrow down possible setting or BIOS issue.

If the above doesn’t help or you the logs confuse you feel free to ask for further help.

1 Like

I am using XMP on my memory

I ran a full system stress test for more than a day earlier this week and my system was stable.

They are all seated properly. Also, from how the monitors are going black, it seems more like an issue with the system rather than a loose display cable.

I haven’t checked in a bit but I’ll try updating it and see how it goes.

The following is all the log lines from me starting Musescore until I killed it off

Jul 04 12:06:25 user-pc systemd[2936]: Started app-flatpak-org.musescore.MuseScore-1197425.scope.
Jul 04 12:07:23 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:07:23 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:07:38 user-pc acpid[888]: client 1144[0:0] has disconnected
Jul 04 12:07:38 user-pc systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty6.
Jul 04 12:07:46 user-pc login[1198081]: pam_unix(login:session): session opened for user user(uid=1000) by LOGIN(uid=0)
Jul 04 12:07:46 user-pc systemd-logind[930]: New session 69 of user user.
Jul 04 12:07:46 user-pc systemd[1]: Started Session 69 of User user.
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc acpid[888]: client connected from 1144[0:0]
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc acpid[888]: 1 client rule loaded
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 7 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Successfully made thread 1199530 of process 2946 owned by '1000' RT at priority 5.
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 7 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Successfully made thread 1199531 of process 2946 owned by '1000' RT at priority 5.
Jul 04 12:07:55 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:07:58 user-pc systemd[2936]: app-flatpak-org.musescore.MuseScore-1197425.scope: Consumed 49.207s CPU time.
Jul 04 12:08:16 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:08:16 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:09:24 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.
Jul 04 12:09:24 user-pc rtkit-daemon[1271]: Supervising 8 threads of 4 processes of 1 users.

I managed to catch the event happening on camera. It stops as soon as I close Musescore.
This video was taken some time during the log snipped shown above.

The monitor in the right is connected using HDMI and the monitor in the left is connected using DisplayPort

What I said meant that when running under low load, not stress testing, the system will be stable but idling or watching a Youtube video will crash the system.

From what I see your system is not crashing, it’s just showing a black screen. Mousecore might be the issue. Have you tried uninstalling it or not running it at all?

From the vid. It’s looking like either a driver issue or something being induced by the software causing the GUI to bug out. I’d update your drivers/OS and probably do what Metalize recommends.

Yeah I’d have to guess the same. I feel like it’s more likely a software thing than hardware or cables etc, since the display doesn’t die completely (mouse cursor still there).

Other ideas depending on how opinionated or locked-in you are to various choices:

  • Slightly older/newer driver if available
  • Switch to/from open source drivers (supposedly NVidia’s open source drivers are improving…)
  • Try another desktop environment (not sure how feasible that is without another install though, I’m able to install and run KDE over an XFCE Mint install just fine, but putting KDE over top Cinnamon is highly not recommended)

Or try an older/newer version of Musescore, or just a non-Flatpak version.