I’m experiencing a graphical issue on Zorin OS when the system goes into suspend due to inactivity (not when the monitor simply turns off).
To clarify the difference:
When the monitor turns off only, everything works normally when I wake it up.
When the entire system suspends automatically after inactivity, the problem appears after resuming.
After waking the computer from suspend, the screen shows noticeable graphical artifacts — like scattered black/gray blocks or “stains” across the display. In addition, small fonts look distorted or pixelated, as if the rendering is broken. The issue affects the whole desktop environment, not just a specific application.
The problem does not happen after a normal reboot. It only appears after the system resumes from suspend.
What I’ve observed:
Happens only after automatic suspend due to inactivity
Does not happen if only the screen turns off
Reboot fixes it temporarily
Small text looks especially bad
The artifacts are visible across the entire screen
Does this happen when You set it manually in suspend? Does Your System run in Wayland or X11? You can check that with the Terminal Command echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
Thanks for the specification! That's actually very new and not old at all!
Have you tried switching to Wayland in the login screen? If not, you can try switching to Wayland over there (by clicking on the gear/settings icon in the bottom-right). In case its not visible, i'll attach the commands for the same.
Also, NVIDIA graphics cards have always had issues with linux in general, but a ton of fixes have been done after Wayland arrived, so I hope this works for you
The situation has improved compared to X11 — I no longer get the large black/gray squares all over the screen after resume.
However, there are still graphical glitches present. As shown in the attached screenshot:
There are small visual artifacts near UI elements (for example near the “Z” icon in the taskbar).
Some fonts look slightly corrupted or improperly rendered.
The issue is subtle compared to before, but definitely still present after resuming from suspend.
So while Wayland reduces the severity of the problem, it does not completely fix it.
I am using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers selected through the “Software & Updates” application. Specifically, the one listed as: “NVIDIA driver (open kernel) metapackage from nvidia-driver-590-open (proprietary, tested).”
Good to see some improvement! There's two things I noticed, first is that in terms of the font, the 'r' alphabet has an issue being rendered, and for the Zorin icon issue, it's definitely an issue with the GPU (mostly the NVIDIA drivers).
I'd suggest you two steps that you can do one at a time, and you can report your experience here after the first step and then based on what has improved/not improved, I can suggest the second step or rather another solution altogether.
The first step for you is to switch to the older versions of the NVIDIA drivers (because it's always the graphics card causing the graphical issues). You can switch to the older ones and reboot after each version downgrade and test each version after suspend.
If none of those work, you can let us know and we'll see if the second step should be taken or not
