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bean_lumpkin

Member

Registered: 2025-09-22

Posts: 2

[SOLVED] Screen turns off shortly after loading Xfce4

I've been happily using Xfce4 for a long time on my laptop through Arch Linux. (Thanks to everyone who contributes to both of those projects!) I recently did a system upgrade, and I ran into a strange problem: Xfce4 loads, the display is active for a short time, and then the display turns off. I can switch to a tty console in order to start using my computer from the console (and explore this problem), but returning to the running Xorg session turns the screen off again. I first started discussing and exploring this problem on the Arch Linux forums: I've been having an active discussion with a very helpful member there.

From that thread I discovered that I can turn the display back on again from the console with

sleep 10; DISPLAY=:0 xrandr --output eDP-1 --auto

and then shifting over to the Xorg session. So that's a work around, but not ideal, and it doesn't identify the problem.

I'm running Xfce 4.20.2. Here are some additional details about my current configuration:

• A recent Xorg log

• The output of `journalctl -b`

• My `$HOME/.xinitrc`

• My current values of `xfconf-query -c displays -lv`

As you can see from my most recent post in the Arch Linux forums thread, we were exploring whether Xfce (or a related process) may be trying to activate the (nonexistent) display on the HDMI port, so I tried changing the value of the /Default/HDMI-1/Active property to false, but that hasn't helped. I remain confused about what might be turning off my display when Xfce loads.

I have a few scattered questions, but I don't know if they're helpful to this situation: how do the xfconf values relate to the Settings > Display GUI? (In particular, how can there be HDMI display settings in xfconf when there is no HDMI display option or profile in the Display GUI?) Also, what is the meaning of the /AutoEnableProfiles property in the consoles channel?

Last edited by bean_lumpkin (2025-09-24 20:29:01)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,252

Re: [SOLVED] Screen turns off shortly after loading Xfce4

Hello and welcome.

As a first step, while not logged in and the xfconfd process not running (check to make sure), rename the ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/display.xml file. Next time you start, it will reset the display settings and maybe fix the issue with the missing hdmi display.

You can also try running xfsettingsd in debug mode to see what's happening:

XFSETTINGSD_DEBUG=displays xfsettingsd --replace

...see what the specific debug code says. If the display turns off after 10 seconds you'll have to be quick. You can pipe the output to file if you are unable to recover to see the output.

I'll leave this bug report here - I'm not sure if its related, but a patch has just been pushed out.

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bean_lumpkin

Member

Registered: 2025-09-22

Posts: 2

Re: [SOLVED] Screen turns off shortly after loading Xfce4

As a first step, while not logged in and the xfconfd process not running (check to make sure), rename the ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/display.xml file. Next time you start, it will reset the display settings and maybe fix the issue with the missing hdmi display.

That first step did it, thanks very much! That reduced my display.xml file to

<?xml version="1.1" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<channel name="displays" version="1.0">
  <property name="ActiveProfile" type="string" value="Default"/>
</channel>

And so I'm not sure what it was about the original configuration file that was causing the misdirection, but I'm glad that this is fixed!