Comment 18 for bug 1574278

Augustine Souza alias vasa1 at the Ubuntu Forums found the workaroud:

*Change to the gtk theme Adwaita*

when it is available.

I found that several other themes work too without flickering (but not Lubuntu-default and Lubuntu-dark-panel).

Some of these themes render the text black in black background for marked text, others render the text dark but visible.

-o-

Workaround in a system directly from the current Lubuntu Xenial i386 iso file:

Start Abiword and edit a file. If it starts flickering, select

Menu -- Preferences -- Customize look and feel

- Select another theme alias 'widget style'

- Press the button 'Apply' and watch what happens in the Abiword window. Edit and do things to check how it works with this new theme, and stay with a theme that works for you.

For example the first one in the list, Clearlooks, works for me in a Toshiba laptop with Intel graphics from 2013,

http://www.toshiba.se/laptops/satellite-pro/c850/satellite-pro-c850-19w/

and in a desktop with nvidia graphics from 2008,

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/M2NVM_DVI/

-o-

In Xubuntu Core, which runs the gtk theme Greybird by default, the cursor was flickering (no strips), and it was fixed by selecting the theme Adwaita, like by Augustine Souza in his upgraded Lubuntu system.