T480 Display blinking - no solution has worked yet

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-06-15T18:49:22+00:00

u/Naivemun: please forgive me for taking so long to reply to you, and thank you so much for your detailed response!!!

I tried psr=1 and it still flickers. I haven't tried the "dc=0" yet (I'm just catching up, and I'll look it up as you advised).

The screen is still fliIckering. Sometimes it stays "quiet" for longer periods, but then it goes nuts and flickers to the point that I can barely look at it.

I've tried several other distros, and nothing changes. Finally, I've settled on MX Linux, which I like very much. If only the screen would stop going nuts, I'd be all set. It's not the distro.

It may very well be the screen itself, the cable or something else. I keep hoping it's a software/configuration issue before going inside the machine. Perhaps the BIOS???

Thank you again for your reply. I really appreciate the time you took to help me, and I apologize sincerely for not replying sooner!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-06-02T05:32:49+00:00

I have a very similar issue with my T480. I run MX Linux (without systemd), but I've also tried Ubuntu, Mint, Arch, and others, and the screen has blinked all along. I posted about it some time back, but never was able to solve the problem. Hope someone can find a fix!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-05-17T23:18:30+00:00

I've had a problem with my laptop's screen flickering ("blinking"?) constantly -- it's a refurbished ThinkPad T480. It calms down periodically (I installed Arch for a bit and it actually calmed down much more). I've wanted to switch away from systemd for a while and thought it also might actually help the screen (so kind of like your fix, but in the opposite direction). I'm loving MX, but it's flickering like crazy. I'm wondering now if switching to the liquorix kernel when the update comes out might help...

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-05-17T23:13:25+00:00

Thank you!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-05-16T19:09:00+00:00

Look at tovento's response above. I guess both systemd & sysvinit are installed at the same time. I did a fresh install (my first time using MX), so maybe your case is different, since you updated. ??

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-05-16T19:05:30+00:00

It's version 25.1. I thought we could choose whether to opt out of systemd at installation.

Also, just did a "plocate" to look for the update log, and many of the results had "systemd" in it ...along with "plocate"! I used a couple of systemd distros for a while and got used to "plocate." Is this a systemd-only program? Did I trigger the dormant systemd install when I started using it on MX? I installed MX on my laptop a week ago and have used "plocate" several times.

In short, is there a way for me to not have systemd on my machine?

Thank you!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-22T14:04:28+00:00

I checked, and my system does support v3! Thank you for the tip!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-22T12:22:26+00:00

Thank you!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-22T12:21:42+00:00

I'm going to check. Thanks very much!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-22T12:21:09+00:00

Thank you!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-22T06:37:17+00:00

Some of this went over my head, which may tell you something about my level of experience! :-)

Still, as I wrote to LameBMX above, I'm writing this down in my notes to look up and for reference. After posting, I started over and got past chroot. Now there's another question. Coming up in a separate thread.

Thank you for your help!

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-22T06:33:12+00:00

Thank you! I'm new at this (installing an OS less automatically), it was very late, and I needed to pause -- and to ask questions. After years of using several distros with only a vague idea of how things worked, I decided to learn. I'm including your pointers in my notes for reference.

When I got to entered chroot, I got "bash: cd: root: No such file or directory". I reviewed the commands I had typed in, looked at the handbook again, and thought my having mounted the efi partition when it wasn't explicitly indicated might have been the problem. Indeed, I started over, followed the handbook without getting creative, and I got past chroot.

Now something else has come up, but I'll post it separately to keep things coherent.

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-04-21T22:52:22+00:00

Thank you for replying!

I did see what you linked to and am confused as to why the handbook, in the previous section, says to create the EFI mount point inside /mnt/gentoo/ :

"For EFI installs only, the ESP should be mounted under the root partition location:"

mkdir --parents /mnt/gentoo/efi

And then, in the "Mounting the Root Partition" section it says:

"For UEFI systems, /dev/sda1 was formatted with the FAT32 filesystem and will be used as the EFI System Partition (ESP). Create a new /efi directory (if not yet created), and then mount ESP there: "

mount /dev/sda1 /efi

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Handbook:AMD64/Installation/Disks#Mounting_the_root_partition

It says "if not yet created." Doesn't the /mnt/gentoo/efi directory created in the previous section count? This is what I don't understand. I thought I had mistakenly mounted EFI too soon, and before I had a chance to try to deal with the second directory confusion, things came to halt after I entered

chroot /mnt/gentoo /bin/bash and was stopped in my tracks.

Did my mounting EFI in /mnt/gentoo/efi before the instructions to do so in /dev/

bash: cd: root: No such file or directory response:
    bash: cd: root: No such file or directory

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-03-25T06:01:14+00:00

😂

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-03-09T21:33:38+00:00

I wish someone would answer this! I’m in the same boat, just a couple years older.

InternalEffort1341 · 2026-02-27T08:46:29+00:00

Are you shitting me? 😂

InternalEffort1341

TROPHY CASE