Screen flicker on Zorin OS 17.2 - Surface Pro 5

Hi. I'm new to Linux and obviously Zorin.

I've installed Zorin and followed the extra stuff I needed to do specifically on Surface Pros (Set Up Microsoft Surface Device - Zorin Help).

Everything works fine apart from the screen which flickers all the time. Display settings say the refresh rate is 59.96hz and I don't know if the 0.04 makes a difference. I cant change the refresh rate.

I have made sure everything is up-to-date. There are no additional drivers available. I have tried running as xorg and tried various screen resolutions. Nothing helped.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Peter

On the Surface Pro's Intel includes PSR (Panel Self Refresh) which often causes flickering.
You can disable this with a custom boot parameter.
Elevate to root:

sudo -i

Then launch the file manager:

nautilus

In the left pane, select "Other locations." Then in the right pane, select "Computer."
This will reach Root - double click on etc then default then right click on grub and select to open in text editor.

Move to the line:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

and add the parameter. When finished, it will look exactly like:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0"

Save the file

Once the file is saved, you can close out the text editor and elevated Root Folder.
In terminal run

sudo update-grub

for the changes to take effect.

In Zorin Settings, disabled Power Save, as well.
That can cause the flicker.

Another cause is desktop animations. While they can prettyfy the desktop, they can smack against the graphic stack. In terminal, you can globally diable them with

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false

only nautilus, without sudo in the second command

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Fixed.

Sometimes I type on autopilot...

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Thanks. I'll try that later today.

Seems to have sorted it. Thanks

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