not sure if this has been around since my first install (just over a month back) or if it started shortly after, but I find a great number of windows showing up as follows:
running Zorin 17.1 with a Ryzen 5 7600X and a Radeon RX 7800XT
I did try to install the proprietary AMD drivers, and while I didn't get any explicit errors, I don't think they are actually enabled correctly.. launching "Software & Updates" and checking the "Additional Drivers" tab, I still see a message that "No proprietary drivers are in use".
honestly I don't really mind which GPU drivers my system uses; I dual boot my system, keeping Windows around purely for gaming and photo editing.. Linux is my daily OS for everything else.
please could somebody help me work out what what's happened here?
You can try to log in under X11 and see if that makes any difference. It's probably a driver thing (of which I admit I have very little clue about) but this may be a workaround this for now.
To do that, you need to be logged in to your account and then log out. When you are at the login screen again, you should see a little wheel icon at the bottom right corner. Click on that and select the option that says "Zorin Desktop on Xorg", as shown in the screenshot from this post:
I would say this is a workaround, since both options should work, although there's nothing wrong with using or the other (that's the whole point of having choices). Unfortunately I cannot really help much more than that, but this is a valuable clue as to what may be the cause.
X11 and Wayland (those are the two options available at the logging screen) are different technologies to display windows and so on.
Maybe someone who knows more than me can give some more useful insight about this.
cool, that makes sense. thanks @zenzen, I appreciate your time.
not sure if I have any GPU driver issues, since I have no explicit error messages to work from... as per the suggestions in this guide, I did try with "Secure Boot" disabled (MSI X670-P Pro WiFi), but then I can't boot... I don't even get to GRUB, with my PC booting directly into BIOS until I enable it again.
with that said, I did install mesa-utils and the output from glxinfo | grep "direct rendering" does indeed show "yes", so I do have access to the hardware acceleration side of my GPU.
I'll leave this thread open for the moment then, hopefully someone with the relevant knowledge will see this and help clear it up for me.
I agree with ZenZen; it is a temporary fix. However I must add that I have had display issues on several distros running Wayland ranging from annoying to unuseable, but none with running X11.
IMHO Wayland, while apparently offering a more modern display technology, is not yet ready for prime time. When I say not ready, I mean it doesn't have the "it just works" reliability that I've experienced with X11.
Full disclosure: I don't play video games, so I can't comment on the differences/benefits between X11 and Wayland.
thanks for the feedback. I've been running with X11 for a few days now and I see what you mean by how every "just works", I haven't experienced any issues so far...
for what it's worth, I also don't game on Linux.. I'm quite happy to keep dual boot with Windows 10 around for that purpose.
