xserver-xorg-video-intel causes screen flickering in plasma on XPS 15 7590

[Egbert van der Wal]

I have been experiencing screen flickering related to the compositor in KDE / Plasma on Ubuntu 19.10 on my Dell XPS 15 7590 laptop.

I found the same problem + a solution here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/f7itw4/plasma_flickering_neonkubuntu/

It turns out that even though I do have Intel chip (IGP on Core i7-9775H) using the Intel driver i915, the package xserver-xorg-video-intel doesn't seem to be required and does cause screen flickering.

Removing this package as suggested on reddit fixes the flickering issue for me and so far I didn't seen any negative side effects - all 3D rendering still works.

Either xorg-video-intel package should be solved to not cause flickering (and have effects where it is not needed) or it shouldn't be installed by default.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

It doesn't matter if it's installed by default, you need to specifically configure X to use it. The default is modesetting_drv.so.

[Egbert van der Wal (eggie)]

You are so right, my apologies.

This bug report can be discarded.

In my efforts to get everything working on a new installation of Kubuntu over the past few days, I unknowingly enabled the Intel driver for XOrg. Unknowingly because: I assumed I was already using it. I put in a config snippet in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf in a (failed) attempt to fix the screen brightness controls. This specifically links the PCI address and the intel drivers. I now removed that file, re-installed xserver-xorg-video-intel package and no flickering.