I have a 2nd monitor, and I have found it often ends up frozen with whatever was last on it. I cannot move the mouse into it or get the screen to update.
The fix which sometimes works is Ctrl+Alt+F7, which shows some error messages, and then Ctrl+Alt+F1, which will bring it back. But it doesn’t always work, sometimes it gets stuck for longer or in a worse way.
Using KDE (Wayland) and nVidia graphics.
Both monitors are the same make and model and the same refresh rate, connected to the same graphics card.
I’m happy to say it hasn’t happened again since updating everything (yay), including nVidia driver to 565.77. I can’t rule it out happening again but I’m hopeful.
I spoke too soon. It has still happened semi-regularly. It seems to happen most when the system is under load, for example, playing a CPU intensive game, or worst of all, mining crypto which makes it guaranteed to happen.
The last time it happened I got the 2nd monitor back, but then lost the first monitor a few minutes afterwards. Then I lost both - they were frozen. After 10 minutes of trying various key combinations, the monitors went into standby due to lack of output.
I couldn’t get the REISUB combo to do anything (probably needs enabling), so eventually just had to do a hard reset. The thing is the computer was fine and all its processes were running as normal, it’s just that I couldn’t see anything because plasmashell has crashed.
I have found hundreds of reports of this going back 4+ years and nobody has a solution besides things like killing/restarting plasmashell or kwin --replace or kwin_wayland --replace. But I can’t even get to a console to run those commands. I think I will just have to try a different desktop environment.
No it’s definitely not a hardware issue. The PC has been fully stress tested, PSU is more than adequate, temperatures are always low even under heavy load. System has mined crypto for months in Windows without issue. It can do it in Linux as well, it’s just that there is a specific problem with KDE Plasma where it gets a frozen screen. The computer itself and the rest of the OS is still fine and working normally, just without the screen updating any more. It might be a Wayland issue, so I’ll try with X11 for a while.
On the non-frozen screen it’s as if nothing has happened, I can use the computer like normal, examine the processes etc. There might even be a video playing on the frozen screen which I can still hear the audio of because it’s playing, it just has the screen stuck with whatever it showed last. If I open a console on the non-frozen screen then I can restart plasmashell or kwin to get it back.
