Bunsen labs ditched

 I said I'd try Bunsen Labs Linux in a real world situation to do real work.

So I did.

Using Libre Office to review a document I started to get an annoying intermittent flicker - it could have been a latent hardware fault or it could be that the Radeon screen driver shipped with Bunsen Labs wasn't optimal for my hardware.

Well, only my pride was affected, I had very little work on the machine, so I wiped it and installed Ubuntu, remembering to click the third party drivers box.

I deliberately chose Ubuntu as they have particularly good support for Lenovo machines.

Well, changing operating systems seems to have cured the flicker problem (maybe).

It's certainly better but it does come back occasionally. The only thing to do is try it for some time and see if it is just as bad with Ubuntu as it was with Bunsen Labs.

(AMD also provide Radeon drivers for Ubuntu, and if the flicker comes back, I might well give these a go. Unfortunately, they don’t provide generic Debian drivers, and Bunsen Labs is based on generic Debian but there is a wiki page on AMD Radeon on Linux).

Bit of a pity, because I quite liked Bunsen Labs, but to be fair they did warn you on install it was a hobbyist supported distro, and that there might be problems ahead.

While I'm obviously disappointed, it won't stop me from trying Bunsen Labs again on other hardware...

[update 09/09/2025]

Well, I was still getting an intermittent flicker with Ubuntu 24, so I did a little digging.

lspci was correctly showing the graphics card to be an AMD Radeon, but as I still occasionally got a flicker, so nothing ventured I downloaded the latest AMD driver for the hell of it

The lspci output after downloading didn't seem to be a lot different, so I tried doing what I had been doing on Bunsen Labs when I got the annoying flicker and started paging through the document with Libre Office.

Well, on the basis of a sixty second test I'm not getting the flicker.

I'll work some more with it to make sure it's really gone ...