The flicker hunt
Symptom
The desktop flickered on mobile GPUs — but only once a window was open.
Root cause
The desktop’s ambient glow was an animated background. Windows sit on top of it with backdrop-filter blurs, and a perpetually-moving backdrop forces the GPU to re-blur every open window’s full area on every frame — forever. Nothing was wrong with either layer alone; the cost was the composition of the two.
The rule it became
No backdrop-filter over anything that moves.