System crash upon inactivity screen lock

By default, my Qubes OS 4.1 installation attempts to lock the screen after a certain amount of inactivity. A few minutes ago, when the system locked on me due to inactivity, the OS crashed.

I know that some issues can result from the automatic screen lock, but this is particularly disturbing because, upon taking a close look at the screen, I could see that Qubes was turning the monitor on/off in a loop. I am on a new Purism Librem 14v1 and don’t believe there are any hardware issues here. I tried clicking around and doing different key presses, but nothing would change, so I had to do a force-shutdown.

Any ideas on how to prevent this in the future? In addition to not feeling good about forcing my machine off, I worry this kind of issue can damage the screen if left unattended.

Are you sure that it was a normal screenlock and that you machine did not go into hibernation or some other sleep state?

On some machines suspend is not working and Qubes has a hard time trying to wake up again. Not sure what the default settings are, but i think if you where on battery it is possible it entered sleep when locking the screen as per settings.

If you are on XFCE (which everybody is per default) you can go to the power settings in your menu and disable all “suspend to Disk” or “suspend to RAM” stuff. If this fixes the problem, it is a sleep state thing, not a screen lock thing.

1 Like

Check your monitor refresh rate (for the monitor disconnect loops). I can’t use anything other than 60hz or it goes nuts (with dual monitors anyways). Single monitor I can do 144hz all day. I had to create a display profile with both monitors set to 60Hz and enable “Connect new displays when connected” and “Automatically enable profiles when new display is connected” (System Tools → Display → Advanced)

I also get this random screen lock crash. I tried disabling the screen saver, which reduces the frequency of those lockups, but it doesn’t stop them. I have turned off hibernation and all the power stuff I can find.