Blocks become transparent under a certain pitch

I am experiencing a bug in minecraft for a while now, at first I thought it was because I was using a modded client.
But I installed a new linux distro yesterday and started playing minecraft with a fresh install and experienced the same.

What happens is that when you stand against a wall and look at it and move your mouse down, the blocks will become whiter and whiter and after a little while you can look through the block.
Screenshots will show you how that looks, I have no idea why this happens and I think it is platform specific because I never experienced this before on windows.

With smooth lighting on minimum or maximum this doesn't happen.