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Ok, so I'm probably being picky here... But this is driving me crazy. I have a Dell Inspiron 3442 laptop, it comes with both an Intel video card and a Nvidia 3D card.

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 0b)
...
08:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF117M [GeForce 610M/710M/810M/820M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M] (rev a1)

The problem is, when everything stops at the screen (no mouse movement, typing, video, gif, animated mouse pointer, etc) the brightness dims a little after about 1 second.. like going from 10 to 9 in brightness. And then when something moves, it lights up to 10 again. If everything stand still, dims to 9 again.

I've consistently had this problem with Ubuntu (several versions), Ubuntu Studio (several versions), Lubuntu (18.04, currently installed). This doesn't happen in Windows. By the way, i'm on dual boot now, but the problem happens even if Linux is the only OS in the system. It's important to note that I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with brightness of the screen per se, nor the "dim when inactive" setting, nor the power settings. I've tried several Nvidia drivers, messed with the settings, but nothing seems to address the problem.

Strange thing: with Lubuntu, when installation completes the problem doesn't happen. But when I install the updates after the first login and restart, it starts to happen. Could I install it clean again and skip every update altogether, including security ones? Still, there's no guarantee it won't surface up after the first reboot.. I really don't know what to do.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

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  • What is your setting in Power → Power Saving → Blank Screen?
    – graham
    Mar 30, 2020 at 18:27
  • It is set to "never" both in battery and plugged in ... I really believe this is a kernel thing, not something controllable from user settings. It seems like a glitch, other than a normal configuration of brightness of the display... Mar 30, 2020 at 19:21

1 Answer 1

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Ok, I solved the problem. It was really in the kernel...

In grub I booted with the 4.15.0-20-generic and the screen dim was gone.

Thanks!!

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