On Thu, 12 Jul 2018, Pete Biggs wrote:
The i915 driver is fairly rock solid - virtually all desktop machines these days have on-board Intel video, it's the lowest common denominator. And your chipset is not exactly cutting edge stuff.
I bought it used.
Are there any errors in the logs - either kernel logs or X logs?
I'm not seeing anything that seems very interesting. Xorg.0.log uses the phrase "falling back" a few times. I expect that just means I've not inerfered with defaults. boot.log-20180625 does not contain any of the sequences rap, RAP, ideo, IDEO. dmesg contains graphics and video, but nothing that seems interesting.
For some reason you say you disliked Gnome - but does Gnome show issues (they use the same video driver)?
I'll try it.
A long shot is the theme. Are you using some non-standard theme on your desktop?
What is a theme?
Finally, do you have a spare graphics card you could try in the machine? (This is just to make sure there's no hardware problem.)
Only as a last resort. Having already lost a couple graphics cards (not in this machine), I open the case rarely and with fear and trepidation.
When I hover over text, the black tape effect goes away. Do graphics cards know about text or hovering?