I’m running a Librem Mini and the Brave browser has taken to flashing, it’s almost unuseable. I’ve checked the hardware acceleration setting like suggested, but to no solution.
Does anyone have any additional advice?
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Contact Purism.
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my Librem 15 v4 running brave browser started flashing also and there were weird toyoto ev adds that would not go away after an update.
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Can you give an example URL that you would be happy sharing and everybody else would be happy visiting and which demonstrates the problem?
One reason for asking that is that I am not clear on what you mean by “flashing”.
Have you performed fault isolation e.g. by trying another browser?
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On occasion, my Librem 14 did something where the programs on the screen such as Brave Browser were flashing, but I do not have a video or anything to check if this is the same kind of flashing you encountered. I run PureOS Byzantium but with Brave Browser ppa added, and I change the desktop environment to MATE instead of GNOME3 or whatever.
So as a consequence of this, my system is running XWindows instead of Wayland and some other nonstandard stuff. I have no idea if this impacts any differences between us.
But when I see the browsers and other applications doing this flashing behavior – which isn’t really flashing so much as maybe the pixels of what they should have displayed moving sideways and then disappearing at high speed into an almost triangle shape then reappearing, for me I have found that:
- I only get this behavior while in the proximity of public WiFi
- If I disable the WiFi hardware kill switch, power off the device, wait 1 minute for capacitors and other systems to discharge, then power on the device
- For me this basically always eliminates the issue
Why does this eliminate the issue? My theory is it might be somebody’s malware doing a zero day against the on-chip stale version of my WiFi driver, since I use a Librem 14 v1 that has a WiFi card which doesn’t require proprietary firmware jail because its firmware cannot be upgraded. For some reason, Purism decided that is bad and made Librem 14 v2 with a firmware jail containing proprietary firmware, so that government employees or other people in the know (who have the source code that we don’t have) can upgrade their firmware. This means Purism is probably aware of a reason to stop using the Librem 14 v1 that I am using with this older WiFi chip (Atheros AR9xxx) instead of the newer chip Intel AX200 that they ship now.
I do not actually have a Librem Mini but if it has similar hardware and maybe a similar challenge, if you are using an Atheros AR9xxx similar to me, then people using the spooky zero day vulnerability to try to hack you and inadvertently breaking your machine might be the issue. Since they can’t leave any files behind on your computer for their world order mafia hack, that wants to sneak in undetectable to operating system, it means that when you power everything off and kill all the electricity, and then power the device back on, it’ll be clean until you get in range of them again.
This is extremely superstitious and dumb what I am saying, but if it’s 50% of the way towards the truth the people who actually know the truth aren’t going to tell you it. Next time I get the flashing and flickering that I’m talking about, maybe I should try to record that it happened and see if I can find it in my system logs in case there’s anything noted down about issues encountered or abnormal system operation, but as of yet I have not invested the time and energy to identify that.
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