Stange flickering of the whole session, and periodic dimming of the display's backlight: Acer nitro 5 (ryzen 4000 + nvidia)

[skylineone044]

The [Stable Update] 2020-12-30 - Kernels, KDE, Cinnamon, LibreOffice, Python 3.9, Mesa 20.3.1 using the 5.10 kernel seems to have resolved the flickering issue. (using 59 the flickering returns)

It took some work to get everything working though:

• I have completely removed any nvidia related packages, then did the update, then installed the new rolling nvidia driver (with mhwd), because without uninstalling them, pacman did not let me just straight update from 455xx to the rolling driver.
• I also had to reinstall optimus-manager (I use the AUR package, so I just cleanbuilt it with yay)
• Also applied the fix for the black screen issue on AMD GPUs, see the above linked forum post for more details, I just followed the instructions in the forum post:

@philm

For AMD GPU users having a black screen with kernel 5.10

Please click the ► at the beginning of this line to view more info

Due to a bug in the AMD drivers, please try the following first:

For GRUB:

1. Open a terminal or a TTY
2. Open /etc/default/grub in your favourite CLI editor ( nano vi , emacs`)
3. Find the line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="
4. Add amdgpu.dc=0
5. Save
6. Execute sudo update-grub and reboot

For now everything seems to be working fine, and (on kernel 510) the screen flicker and backlight blinking is gone.