Ubuntu 16.04 graphics problems
 

Appealing to anyone with any Ubuntu knowledge!
I have a ThinkPad T450s which has an Intel Graphics 5500 chip in it. On 15.10 graphics ran really well and I could connect external monitors etc. However, on 16.04 I have encountered some problems with the graphics:
Display flickering when trying to render graphics on screen (this can be as much as a particularly animated website or YouTube video)
External monitor dropping out (I have a bug open for this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1574617)
Anti-aliasing doesn't seem to work very well

My Launchpad bug report was originally for a T410 laptop which suffered the same issues on 16.04 but not on 15.10; my new Thinkpad is exactly the same - runs fine on 15.10 and not on 16.04. I'm wondering if it's a 'Thinkpad thing' or maybe I'm doing something stupid?

Thanks for any help,

(By the way - on both versions I tried with Intel graphics drivers: they seemed to make no difference on 15.10 and reduced the issues in 16.04)

Hi Crablab,

Have you tried reverting the graphic driver in 16.04 to the version in 15.10 to see if it is a driver problem?

EG

Hi EG,

I was under the impression Linux graphics drivers were fairly baked into the OS?

Regards,

EDIT:

Thus rather more difficult to up/down grade

Linux comes with lots of drivers already installed, and for many graphics installations they are all that is required. However I do some heavy graphics work and for the desktop machines always have a mid-range graphics card installed which is going to work best with the manufacturer's drivers. Nowadays it's pretty painless to install them in place of the default, but it's true it didn't use to be. (I've been a Linux user since 1993.)

On your Thinkpad I cannot really comment, my laptops are from HP and the default graphics are fine with SuSE on one and Manjaro on the other. But if you don't need to be riding on the leading edge why not drop back to 15.10?


'a

Hi,

The graphic drivers tend to be in separate packages. Each release will have a base version included with it. With many packages there are cross dependencies which prevent going back to a version from a previous release. That said I would not expect a graphics driver to have many, if indeed any, cross dependencies.

What you may have to do is get the package source for the previous version and compile on 16.04.

At this point I have to say that my experience is on Centos/Red Hat which has different tools for package management than Ubuntu (which is a Debian derivative), so I cannot give you an Ubuntu Howto - sorry.

EG

Ah - had a little look into this and have upgraded the kernel which seems to have reduced some of the tearing issues but it's by no means fixed...

I've thought about going back to 15.10 but it's too much effort to downgrade and given the number of people complaining I would hope Canonical has a fix on the way.