First things first, I’m a Linux noob attempting to get familiar with day to day use on a laptop. So bare with me here.
The best I can describe the issue is that every once and awhile, the whole screens looks as though it’s an interlaced video, but instead of it being a single row of pixels, it’s rows 5-6 pixels in height. Along with that, text will turn into a jumbled mess. I would post a picture of the “interlacing” but I cannot force it to happen. It also happens regardless of driver version.
But here is the jumbled text. It goes back to normal when I move my mouse over it.
As stated, I’m new to Linux but I’ll post the information I see as potentially relevant:
Dell 15 7559
i5-6300HQ
960M
Drivers: Nvidia - 381.22, 384.11, 387.34, 390.25 and Nouveau 1:1.0.15-2
The interlaced look can and does happen to any window (browsers, terminals, system menus)
The messy look in the picture only happens to text. And as you can see in that, it doesn’t do it to all the text on screen, just sections.
I should mention they’re independent issues and one isn’t a precursor to the other.
not an expert, but… can it be a fontconfig settings bug? I had an issue looking very similar after installing fontconfig / freetype from an untested repo.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at those.
As for the drivers, those are the drivers I used to see if the issues were driver related. I tested Nouveau after none of the Nvidia drivers mitigated the issue.
I had also done some reading into Bumblebee and Prime previously, but when I attempted prime-select nvidia
it would cause my laptop to freeze while Mint loaded. But as stated, I’m not much of a linux person as of now so I’m not sure what the actual issue may have been with that.
Mint is definitely running older software and that could be causing issues. I would not say that you need to change your distro, but if you are trying to learn, I would recommend Debian Testin, Fedora, Arch, Suse Leap/Tumbleweed.
While most will recommend Ubuntu, I tend to not recommend for those that want to Learn because Canonical tends to do things their own way. Also sometimes there are bugs/issues in Ubuntu that do not exist anywhere else as a result.
I’ll probably switch Distros if I can’t find a way to fix this.
Is there a “best practice” for doing that, or will formatting the partition and installing suffice?
Other than that, the same rules apply as when switching to different OSes. You need to format and then install. Even when the distros share the same base, it is not recommended to convert one over to the other by just changing repositories.
Well since you are using a 4.4 kernel,
it looks to me that you are currentlly on an older version of Linux mint.
Linux mint 18.0 probablly or something?
Maybe you could try to upgrade to Linux mint 18.3 firstlly,
That uses a way newer kernel with better hardware support.
Then re-install the drivers using the driver manager and see if that improves things.
It might be a Cinnamon thing though.
So upgrading would be the first thing i start with.
