I did a software update on my laptop a couple of days ago. They’re usually pretty uneventful things, but now the laptop’s display goes blank a few seconds after I start logging in.
I noticed that the kernel got updated, and Fedora Linux keeps a couple of previous copies of the kernel available for just these kinds of problems, so I tried booting with the previous kernel and, yeah, it works. I installed the latest beta of the kernel but, nope, still broken.
Since I was scheduled to travel, it’s a darn good thing there’s a workaround. It also works with an external display, but that’s hardly practical to take on an airplane.
I haven’t been able to figure out what is causing the problem — I guess I just have to hope that a future release of the kernel will fix it. In the mean time, I’ve activated a grub (bootloader) option to keep more than two previous kernels so I don’t wipe my last working one when I try a new one.
—2p
addendum 20250213@17:49
For the curious, in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf after [main] insert:
[main]
installonly_limit=8