screen flickering in linux

This has happened enough times that I thought I should write it down. From my extensive (sarcasm) Google research this is caused by a setting on some hardware, PSR stands for Panel Self Refresh and it was turned on by default. Specifically I have seen it on a Dell Inspiron 14 5400, Dell Latitude 7580 and a Lenovo P50. They were all Intel based laptops. If you experience this maddening screen flickering then this may be the issue. This is the fix I have used consistently across Ubuntu, Pop!_Os, Fedora and Manjaro.

Open the grub config line using your text editor of choice

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

edit the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash”

add i915.enable_psr=0 in the quotes

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash i915.enable_psr=0”

save

sudo update-grub

sudo update-grub works on the Ubuntu based distro's on the others I had to use

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

reboot