This one is going to be difficult to explain. I'll start off with the specs of my laptop:

Inspiron 15 7537
I7-4500U/HD4400
GT750M 2GB GDDR5
8GB DDR3
128GB SSD Samsung 830

My issue is with the fact that the screen sort of changes the contrast a little bit and the refresh rate drops, after the screen has been static for a few seconds.

Let me give you an example. I'm running xfce environment, I'm moving the mouse cursor and everything is fine. As soon as I stop and the screen becomes static, essentially any 2 consecutive frames are identical pixel-wise, after a few seconds this phenomenon happens. Then, if I move the mouse, the cursor movement is not silky-smooth as you'd expect at 60Hz, it feels more like it's running at 30Hz. After a few seconds of screen activity (in this case the cursor moving), everything will come back to normal (the contrast reverts back), and the refresh rate goes back to normal. I wish I can record it, but the screen contrast change is barely noticeable, and doesn't really bother me. It's the mouse becoming lazy everytime this happens which is deeply annoying.

Now here's the reason why I think this is kernel related. This bug is not caused by the desktop environment, since I've tried KDE 4 and 5, Gnome, Cinnamon, XFCE, Openbox, and it's not caused by the compositor either, since it happens even without using one.
However I noticed this bug occurs only in distributions with Kernel 4.X.
Happens in Arch, openSUSE Tumbleweed, openSUSE 42.1
Doesn't happen in Debian jessie, openSUSE 13.2, elementary, Linux Mint, Slackware.
It used to be fine in Ubuntu. But with the new release 15.10 and kernel update to 4.2 it started happening here as well.
I have tried changing graphics acceleration from SNA back to UXA, and nothing is different.
I don't really know where to start looking to fix this issue, which is why I am posting here. Has anyone experienced anything like this?

You should look more into kernel 4.2, I recall hearing it is not so good.

It is hard to tell what your question is. Do you want to be able to use ubuntu 15.10? It sounds like it's broken so why do you need to use that version?

it's very clear to me.

fireblast, i can't offer anything really.
but i remember that debian-based distros have several recent kernels in their repositories, and one is not required to uninstall a kernel when one installs another one.
so you should get at it logically and scientifically, try to go down or up version by version (each one should create their own grub entry) and prove or disprove your suspicion.

Thanks for the replies.

@Rinndalir, I am sorry if I wasn't clear with what I was trying to achieve. I wanted to find a fix in the newest kernels so I can stick with Arch/openSUSE Tumbleweed, or any other future distro I might try.

@ondoho, sounds like a great idea. I'll give this a try with Ubuntu and check which versions cause me issues. Are there any significant downsides with sticking to a relatively old kernel on a distro which has otherwise up-to-date packages?

For what it's worth I've tried recording this problem. I've installed archbang since I didn't want to bother configuring a full arch install for a demo. You can't really tell the difference when moving the mouse, it's something which is more felt than seen, but the screen change should be visible (but just barely). Sorry for the slight blurriness, manually focusing a macro lens at long distance is a pain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUxMfOV-E08

You should file a bug at freedesktop.org since you want to be on the latest kernel. You may even find a similar bug already logged.