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Visual distortions on boot, unable to interact with touchscreen

  • /e/ version: v1.5-20221028230215
  • Device model(s): Fairphone 3
  • Device rooted: yes/no

Summary

Sometimes, when restarting my phone, the initial Fairphone and /e/OS splash screens will be distorted. This distortion sometimes continues into the home screen, or sometimes changes to a different kind of corruption, but turning the display off and on again seems to clear it. However, the touchscreen is inoperable and the device must be restarted via battery pull.

This was happening when I was regularly removing and reinserting SD cards whilst exploring another issue so it may be related to that, but it doesn't happen every time so that may be a red herring.

The problem

Steps to reproduce

  1. (Possibly optional) Turn off phone, remove battery, insert/re-insert SD card
  2. Restart phone

What is the current behavior?

Sometimes, the display will be corrupted and the touchscreen inoperable.

Specifically, I have seen the following corruptions:

  • flickering white and black visual artifacts all over the screen
  • bright green splash screen background followed by red/orange filter (see below vid)
  • splash screen animations appeared as repeating ~5px-high strips down the centre ~1/2 of the screen

What is the expected correct behavior?

Normal-looking display, operable touchscreen

Technical informations

Relevant videos

In this video, the initial (usually black) splashscreens are instead bright green. Then, the actual home screen has a red/orange overlay:

green-red-phone

In this video, I am unable to use the touchscreen after during the screen off and back on in order to dispel the visual corruption:

no-touchscreen

Solutions

Workaround

Restart the device again, via battery pull if necessary

Possible fixes

Unknown

Edited by A B