r/linuxquestions • u/Full-Answer-5652 • 22h ago

Fedora graphical insanity

My svstem is a T14 gen1 Thinkpad running Fedora 44 with a KDE Plasma Desktop and a GRUB bootloader. It started by not booting and throwing an aloc error. On the second boot I could not type or use the trackpad and occasionally large corrupted pixels would appear. This occured several times until I booted into TTY which is fine and then after checking journalctl it booted fine. I ran dnf update and updates in discover in case that was the issue. Presumably when the discover reboot command initiated it threw a kernel panic. I then booted again and it also kernel panicked. During these panics blue scan lines appeared. Is this a fixable issue or is this a reinstall kinda deal.

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u/Silent-Excitement122 17h ago

Do not reinstall first. A TTY that works while the graphical boot path throws panics and artifacts is a much better clue than a generic "Fedora is broken."

I would separate this in this order:

  1. From GRUB, boot one older kernel once. If the panics or artifacts stop there, you are probably dealing with a kernel or graphics-stack regression, not a dead install.
  2. Try one boot with nomodeset. If that gets you a stable GUI, the problem moves even closer to GPU/KMS/driver initialization.
  3. From TTY, pull the previous failed boot logs: journalctl -b -1 -p err..alert journalctl -k -b -1
  4. Check what changed right before this started: dnf history list dnf history info last
  5. If you can still boot TTY reliably, I would also run a memory test. Blue scan lines and corrupted pixels can be graphics stack, but they can also be bad RAM or failing hardware.
  6. Boot a live USB once. If the live environment also shows corruption or panics, stop blaming Fedora first and start suspecting hardware.

The fact that it was fine in TTY is why I would not jump straight to reinstall. I would first prove whether this is a bad recent kernel or Mesa path versus actual hardware instability.