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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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I suspect when you swap between the terminal screens you force a resolution input to the screen and/or force the GPU to define what it is expecting to the screen.
If it's not wayland / x11 then try changing your display cable and also which of hdmi/dvi/display port you are using (ie if using hdmi swap to a display port out of GPU and into monitor for example) if you can.
I'd also check what video drivers you're using and see if there are any known issues - I vaguely recall early NVidia GPUs (umm 10x0 series I think ? I run AMD and so dont pay a lot of attention) have been deprecated from the latest kernel (don't think that has flowed down to Mint as it runs older/stable kernels but worth checking).
I run an AMD GPU as I saw that NVIDIA GPU's can be a pain due to NVIDIA's closed approach to linux. I have determined I am running x11 so I will look into methods of trying a wayland session. I am just nervous of switching as I do not want to find myself booting to a terminal instead of a GUI. It is something I will have to research more and make sure I can roll back. I plan to backup and image the system before going down this route.
Question, would timeshift be able to roll back a switch from x11 to wayland in case of an issue? And am I right in thinking I would have to boot from a live usb to perform the appropriate timeshift restore?
Thank you for your help.
Dude you're not changing any configs by trying it, it's already installed. You're just selecting an existing option.
Far be it from me to discourage good backups though.
To answer the question no timeshift won't roll it back because there is no change to rollback.
Think of it as grabbing your tv remote and switching the input on your tv from hdmi1 to hdmi2 to swap to the ps5/xbox from the cable box. You're not changing the config you're choosing an alternate input that was already there.
Now if it goes badly (I'll be shocked if it does) then there is a simple way to revert, use your ctrl-alt-f4 (or f3 or f5) keys to swap to a fresh terminal login, login, then type
shutdown -r now
And hit enter
You'll be back after the reboot at the login screen, click on the little mountain icon and choose x11 again (it remembers your last choice) and you're sorted back into x11
Now just to close the loop for when you do need to restore a timeshift backup. Yes it is best practise to boot from a live mint usb & run timeshift from there to restore your last snapshot however in an emergency it will work to initiate the restore from the boot itself (it will initiate a reboot and do it on reboot).
Lastly if it's an AMD gpu I'm betting on hardware, changing that cable and swapping physical connection ports would be top of my list.