This article shows how to fix Google Chrome screen flickering on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Recently, when I scrolled my mouse on the chrome browser, the screen suddenly flickered, really annoying.

3 method to fix Google Chrome screen flickering on Ubuntu 22.04

After several hours of searching the internet, I found a solution to fix the flickering problem on Google Chrome browser using Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04. The solution is outlined in the following steps.

Method 1: Remove xserver-xorg-video-intel

What causes screen flicker is because of the xserver-xorg-video-intel package. This package provides the driver for the Intel i8xx and i9xx family of chipsets, including i810, i815, i830, i845, i855, i865, i915, i945, and i965 series chips. The use of this driver is discouraged if your GPU is new enough (ca. 2007 and newer). You can try uninstalling this driver and letting the server use its built-in mode setting driver instead.

sudo apt-get purge xserver-xorg-video-intel

Fix Google Chrome screen flickering on Ubuntu 22.04 — Remove xserver-xorg-video-intel to fix Chrome flickering (Illustration)

After completing the installation process, restart or log out of your computer.

Method 2: Change google-chrome.desktop file exec config to fix Chrome flickering

To fix screen flickering on Google Chrome in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, you can disable the GPU driver and enable GPU memory cache.

Open and edit the file, then scroll down and find the line Exec

sudo nano /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop

Change google-chrome.desktop file exec config to fix Chrome flickering (Illustration)

Replace exec with the following line:

Exec=/usr/bin/google-chrome-stable –disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds –enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers %U

change google-chrome.desktop file exec config

Press Ctrl +X, and select Y to save the file.

Next, open your terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T), create a new Intel config file, and add the following lines:

sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

Section "Device"
   Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
   Driver      "intel"
   Option      "AccelMethod"  "sna"
   Option      "TearFree"    "true"
   Option      "DRI"    "3"
EndSection

Fix Google Chrome screen flickering on Ubuntu 22.04, 20.04

Press Ctrl +X, and select Y to save the file.

Open Chrome and write to the address bar: chrome://flags/ and enter.

Zero-copy rasterizer: Enable
Override Software Rendering List: Enable
Display 2D List Canvas: Enable

Finally, open Chrome Settings -> Advanced Settings -> System -> Use hardware acceleration when available (Enable). Then, restart or log out of your computer.

Method 3: Disable Use hardware acceleration when available Chrome

This method is simpler. You can try it by disabling hardware acceleration, opening Chrome Settings -> Advance Settings -> System Use hardware acceleration when available (Disable). It fixed the issue, but the browser will be much slower. Oh ya, you may encounter scrolling lag, screen tearing, etc.

So you have to enable smooth scrolling. Copy and paste the text below in the Chrome address bar :

Go to: chrome://flags/#smooth-scrolling and Enable it.

Disable Use hardware acceleration when available Chrome

The above steps outline three methods for resolving the issue of screen flickering in Google Chrome on Ubuntu 22.04. Please let us know in the comments section if these methods were helpful in fixing the issue for you.