This is on a 32 bit Atom N450 netbook (Ace AspireONE with 2GB of RAM and 30GB SATA SSD).

I have searched around to try and fix the flickering bug (cursor and upper portion of the screen flickers). Nothing seems to work, although a clue might be that Mate considers Adwaita to not be installed.

This is a fresh Debian 9 install with the XFCE4, MATE, and LXDE desktop tasksels as well as IceWM installed. I have checked XFCE4's checkboxes to "Launch GNOME services on startup" and "Launch KDE services on startup". I have tried changing the GTK2 theme in MATE to different things.

I have tried opening up Abiword with:

I have tried XFCE4, MATE, LXDE, Openbox, Icebox - the symptoms are always the same. Same flickering.

The only thing has made any difference is turning on/off compositing. Turning it on makes the flickering a little bit better, but it still flickers like crazy.

I have not yet tried installing calligrawords because I'm wary of loading up a ton of KDE stuff on this. My experience is that installing a lot of KDE tends to muck up things.

I saw the same thing a while back with Fedora 24 (64-bit) back before it moved out of Rawhide. The only solution I found to get abiword working was to turn off compositing. So I bit the bullet and installed libreoffice.