Video Issues After Reboot

[Totes]

I'm having some severe video issues after rebooting:

• the right half of my primary monitor is showing vertical bars instead of the desktop.
• these bars don't show up in screenshots.
• they appear on my primary monitor (displayport) but will switch to the hdmi monitor if I reboot with only that monitor plugged in.
• I hadn't rebooted in a while, and it looks like the kernel updated to 7.0.0-30, but I tried -29 and -28 and have the same issue.
• display is extremely unstable and changing any display settings will usually lock everything up.
• staying on the broken version of the desktop, things will lock up after a while (I'm in a recovery mode now)

Any ideas? I've been using Zorin for a while, but I'm still a Linux novice. I'm guessing some issue with my video card driver that I either need to reinstall or roll back? Thank you in advance!

Some system details (again, in recovery mode):
OS: Zorin OS 18.1 x86_64
Kernel: 7.0.0-30-generic
Uptime: 1 min
Packages: 2651 (dpkg), 144 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.2.21
Resolution: 2560x1440
DE: GNOME 46.0
WM: Mutter
WM Theme: ZorinPurple-Dark
Theme: ZorinPurple-Dark [GTK2/3]
Icons: ZorinPurple-Dark [GTK2/3]
Terminal: gnome-terminal
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (16) @ 4.81
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT
Memory: 2455MiB / 31987MiB

dadmin@WINTERMUTE:~$ sudo lshw -C video
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: Navi 21 [Radeon RX 6800/6800 XT / 6900 XT]
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI]
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:0c:00.0
logical name: /dev/fb0
version: c1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list fb
configuration: depth=32 latency=0 mode=2560x1440 resolution=2560,1440 visual=truecolor xres=2560 yres=1440
resources: memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:e0000000-e01fffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fcc00000-fccfffff memory:c0000-dffff

[Aravisian]

@Totes

• the right half of my primary monitor is showing vertical bars instead of the desktop.
• these bars don't show up in screenshots.
• they appear on my primary monitor (displayport) but will switch to the hdmi monitor if I reboot with only that monitor plugged in.
• I hadn't rebooted in a while, and it looks like the kernel updated to 7.0.0-30, but I tried -29 and -28 and have the same issue.

To me, these sound like probable Panel Self Refresh issues.
But, as a quick test, can you try lowering your refresh rate on your monitor to see if this results in the screen displaying normally? If it does, you can choose to use a bit lower refresh rate or try a Grub parameter to correct for the display.

Another test is from the Login screen, select to load on Zorin On Xorg (X11) instead of Wayland and see if it works on X11.

[Forpli]

To mme it sounds as if it is a problem with the firmware. Many users with that AMD graphics card had problems after the firmware update.

It can help to downgrade the firmware package.

System crashes / half-screen display corruption after update

Hi all hoping someone is able to help, been loving the ZorinOS till am update that was installed last week caused an issue. I'm not an expert and very new to Linux so I don't know what's happening, after an update I tried to use my computer the next day after shutting down for the night. It loaded fine till the log in screen where half looks normal the other half is pink and yellow lines. I had through it was my monitor but works fine in the bios and wen i boot to windows. I though I try and l…

GPU crashes / half-screen display corruption after update — SMU firmware/driver interface mismatch (AMD RX 6800 XT)

After installing the update on 2026-08-18, my display started showing partial rendering corruption — one monitor would go fully black, or show a clean vertical split with only half the screen rendering (mouse input still worked on the broken half, just no pixels updating). This got progressively worse across reboots, eventually leading to full system freezes. I run a dual monitor display with one being 1440p 144 Hz and the other being 1080p 144 Hz. Both are ran on an AMD 6800 XT. I was able to …

Last linux firmware

With the last update, you pushed the linux firmware 20240318.git3b128b60-0ubuntu2.29. It's causing a breaking issue with my Radeon 6800XT : The right part of the screen is red, making the PC unusable. I was forced to rollback the os with timeshift.

[Totes]

It looks like I'm having issues in both xorg and wayland, but I can only switch between them in recovery mode (no video issues in this mode), but in a regular session that gear on the login screen is always hidden under the video artifacts.

I have one monitor at 60hz and the other was at 59.95hz with no option at 60hz. They used to be at 120hz, but updates or reboots seem to reset me to 60hz periodically.

[Aravisian]

@Totes, Forpli's suggestion may be your best bet:

@Forpli

To mme it sounds as if it is a problem with the firmware. Many users with that AMD graphics card had problems after the firmware update.

It can help to downgrade the firmware package.

[Totes]

Oh hot dog, that fixed it! Thank you both for your help!

Follow up question: can I leave that firmware package on hold indefinitely, or is that guaranteed to eventually cause issues in the future?

[Aravisian]

Yes, Forpli was on top of it. The moment I saw his post, I knew that was it.

You can hold that package long term. But eventually, since Firmware is tied to Kernel updates, it would need to get addressed. By that time, you may be on Zorin OS 19... Or that firmware bug fix released.