Hey folks. I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with Linux for over 20 years. Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it… leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can’t fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.

Windows 11 (even 10) are rock solid for me, even as a very heavy multitasker. No crashes. No needing to reboot, unless I’m forced to with an update, and really no issues with any hardware or software I was running.

But with Linux, I just can’t believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.

I’m trying to learn why this is, and how I can prevent these issues from coming up. As I said, I’m committed to using Linux now (I’m done with American software), so I’m open to suggestions.

For context, I’m using a Framework laptop, which is fully (and officially) supports Fedora and Ubuntu. Since Fedora has American ties, I’ve settled with Ubuntu.

All things work as they should: fingerprint scanner, wifi, bluetooth, screen dimming, wake up from suspend, external drives, NAS shared folders, etc. I’ve even got VirtualBox running Windows 11 for the few paid software that I need to load up from time to time.

But I’m noticing issues that seemingly pop out of nowhere on the software/os end of things.

For example, after having no issues updating software, I get this an error: “something went wrong, but we’re not sure what it is.”

Then sometimes I’ll be using Firefox, I’ll open a new tab to type in a search term or URL, and the typing will “lag”, then the address bar will flicker like it’s reloading, and it doesn’t respond well to my mouse clicks. I have to close it out, then start over for it to resolve.

Then I’ll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won’t.

Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I’ll get a popup asking to wait or quit.

Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted… all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.

I’m trying not to overload things, and I’m doing maybe 1/5th of what I’d normally be doing when running windows. But I don’t understand why it’s so unstable.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, I’m not keen to switch away from Ubuntu, because I do still want official support if there’s ever a problem with getting hardware to work.

UPDATE: Wow, I did not expect to get so many responses! Amazing!

Per suggestions, I ran a memtest86 for over 3 hours and it was clean.

I installed Fedora 41 and am now setting it up. Seems good so far, and elevated permissions can be authorized with biometrics! This was not something I had to. Ubuntu, so awesome there!

Any specific tips for Fedora that I should know? Obviously, no more Snap packages now! 😂

UPDATE 2: Ok, Fedora seems waaaay more stable than Ubuntu (and Mint). No strangeness like before… but not everything works as easily. For example, getting a bridged network adapter to work in virtualbox was one-click easy on Ubuntu… not so much on Fedora (still trying to get it working). And Virtualbox didn’t even run my VM without more terminal hackery.

But the OS seems usable, and I’m still setting things up.

One thing I have noticed, however. When I search for how to fix or do something, nearly all websites and forums reference Debian/Ubuntu commands, so the fragmentation there is a little annoying

  • warmaster@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    If you want to try a distro that can just work for you, instead of reading about it, do this:

    • Aurora if you don’t do gaming.
    • Bazzite if you play games.

    They are both from the Universal Blue family of distros which are based on Fedora Silverblue.

    They are all immutable and atomic. They won’t break. They will be more stable than windows. It will be easy. And it will come with batteries included.

    Also, if you do gaming and are also a developer, there’s bazzite-dx which will be releasing soon.

      • warmaster@lemmy.world
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        9 days ago

        The following is genuine curiosity, no sarcasm or anything negative is intended:

        Why is it American? In name? Because technically it isn’t. Or at least not different from any other distro. I mean, isn’t the Linux Kernel mostly American? How about SystemD? I believe we don’t need to keep listing stuff…

        • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.works
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          9 days ago

          These are more questions for OP. But Fedora is based on RHEL which is owned by IBM. I don’t really fault OP for wanting to avoid American products in this current era. Linux however seems more of a trans-national product.

  • FoolishAchilles@lemm.ee
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    11 days ago

    Unrelated to OP—

    This community is the fuckin sauce! Y’all really jump in to support each other and it’s really cool :)

    I just set up a usb boot for mint yesterday and am prepping my pc to switch once I feel confident enough about Linux. I’m starting to gather that will be much sooner knowing the community is here to help out! I can’t wait to get all my services switched to FOSS alternatives.

  • socphoenix@midwest.social
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    11 days ago

    Offhand anecdotes here as I only have Ubuntu on a 2012 MacBook.

    That said the error post update is likely just a service that didn’t restart properly. Many of these are not necessarily critical, does it say what program crashed? A reboot would guarantee a fix here.

    Unfortunately the issues with apps might be the snap packaging, this does slow apps down a bit which could cause pretty much all the remaining issues. I haven’t personally used it but might look up flatpak as a replacement and see if that helps. If others don’t explain how to do this I will try to come edit this later with an explainer or link or something to help.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      11 days ago

      Unfortunately the issues with apps might be the snap packaging, this does slow apps down a bit which could cause pretty much all the remaining issues. I haven’t personally used it but might look up flatpak as a replacement and see if that helps. If others don’t explain how to do this I will try to come edit this later with an explainer or link or something to help.

      I’ve been reading about Snap packages not being ideal.

      I did get flatpak working (one app is only distributed through flatpaks), but I wonder if it would be better to move any packages to flatpaks, or even just DEB packages instead of Snap.

  • Pasta Dental@sh.itjust.works
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    11 days ago

    It’s purely anecdotal but every time I’ve used an Ubuntu based distro it has been unstable or it nuked itself after 6 months to a year of use. I’ve been on fedora for 2-3 (4?) years now and I’ve not had a single issue apart from the Nvidia drivers behaving wonky sometimes.

    • Alaknár@piefed.social
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      11 days ago

      Had the same feeling about Kubuntu. Absolute shit-show.

      Went through Tuxedo OS (technically also Ubuntu based) and was very happy until Heroic and Steam blew themselves up when I installed a dGPU, then switched to Garuda (Arch based) and so far, so good.

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    You need to start with Linux mint. The errors you are mentioning are common in ubuntu, crashes happen and popup all the time on my ubuntu installations too. But never on Mint. Mint is based on the stable version of ubuntu, that it has long term support and it’s regularly getting updates to make it even more stable and secure. So please start with Mint, or Debian 12 (although Mint is better for new users).

    • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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      10 days ago

      I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.

      I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.

      The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).

      How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.

      Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.

      Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.

      I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.

      • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        I use Linux sine 1999 and I prefer Mint. It works just fine for everyday users. The thing wiht Mint is that it has setting panels for most things, and it makes sense as a design. It might not have the latest support, but what it does, it does well. The same can not be said about other distros in conjunction to care-free users.

        • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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          10 days ago

          Honestly, your usage of linux since 1999 is why I don’t trust you know what’s best for beginners. I give tons of people linux, mostly the elderly, cinnamon has been an absolutely terrible experience for them. You’re highly experienced and used to something that works for you, the best choice for beginners changes more than you do.

          but what it does, it does well.

          Can you not say this about fedora?

          The same can not be said about other distros in conjunction to care-free users.

          The very purpose of an immutable distro is to stop carefree users from doing exactly that, until mint makes an immutable distro, it simply isn’t the best choice for beginners.

          Do they not care about mixed refresh rate displays, mixed dpi displays, the security issues involved in x11, etc? I think they will prefer if those things just work. Mint doesn’t have that, sure what works works well, but that’s true for fedora too… and more works.

      • ChuckEffingNorris@lemmy.ml
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        10 days ago

        Can I just say thank you for offering help like this. I have wanted to switch to Linux for years, but due to proprietary software I simply must use I can’t.

        If I ever get away from needing this software can I take you up on the offer?

        What is matrix lol

        • AndrasKrigare@beehaw.org
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          10 days ago

          I would throw out that Windows executables work surprisingly well on Linux these days via “wine.” I use EndeavorOS and it’s pretty much no work on my part, I double-click a .exe and it starts it up via wine. I think the only thing that’s been spotty for me is Meshmixer crashes sometimes, but it’s also abandonware so I’m not sure it actually runs better on Windows.

      • mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 days ago

        i agree that immutable distros are good for beginners and this is especially true for users who are not exactly tech savvy or don’t want to mess with their systems, but i don’t think the features that cinnamon misses are that important to as many users as you think there are

        HDR is nice but not everyone can afford it, and mixed refresh rate displays might be important for gamers and desktop users but not as much in a laptop ( and yes i know that high refresh rates drain the battery but why would you game on battery anyway ), mixed DPI displays ??? only a small subset of users have those. yes the OP is a heavy multitasker but again he is using a laptop (but having support is nice)

        however what i do agree with is that fractional scaling is awful in cinnamon and the reason i consider it a serious problem is that high res displays are now common and fractional scaling directly affects user experience

        • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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          10 days ago

          Yeah but there’s so many more reasons to choose kde over cinnamon, there is a massive disparity in security between the two, KDE uses wayland by default, and as a result is SIGNIFICANTLY more secure, just off the top of my head, here’s some problems with cinnamon that will not be resolved anytime soon, that have all already been resolved by this transition KDE-side:

          1. Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
          2. Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
          3. Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.

          and in the future the disparity will only go up, just as an example, look at the rate of development on KDE based distros vs cinnamon… cinnamon is entirely outclassed. The KDE team is massive, the cinnamon team is a few people with no real funding. ( if you don’t believe me, here are the stats for the last month cinnamon side: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/pulse/monthly vs https://github.com/KDE/plasma-desktop/pulse although you’ll note kde isn’t developed on github and that’s just a mirror. It’s not even close, cinnamon has less monthly than 1/10th of the weekly for kde. The KDE text editor alone outpaces all of cinnamon dramatically, https://github.com/KDE/kate/pulse ) The rate of code output and refinement is not even close. The level of customization you can do with KDE vs cinnamon isn’t even comparable. If you run into an issue with cinnamon, you’re SOL, whereas KDE can actually worry about your bugs, because they have so many more developers.

          I have tried giving people cinnamon, it has gone disasterously, usually due to DPI problems. But I don’t think it’s a safe recommendation at all, just given the security issues. Also mixed dpi displays are extremely common, many people have 1 4k and 1 1080p screen, for example, or maybe they plug into a tv… it’s much more common than you think.

          In short, i think the only reasonable recommendations for beginners in terms of desktop environments, are KDE or Gnome (if they’re mac users and are willing to learn something different), unless their hardware is TERRIBLE and old, in which case they might want lxqt or xfce, maybe.

          • mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            10 days ago

            first this is not a criticism of kde. use what ever you want i just want to keep expectations within the realm of reality.

            now about the security issues, afaik those problems exists because X11 not cinnamon specifically which is why cinnamon for Wayland exists ( it’s gonna take WAY longer to mature than KDE), but i don’t think that this is a big problem for most for now since our user base is small so there is much less malware and targeted attacks (well as long as you are not a high profile employee at a company with vast data access privileges )

            the mixed dpi displays is a fair point too, i do that sometimes and i would say that i used it more than the people i know who might used it once or twice for a PowerPoint representation or something. programmers, gamers, graphical designers are peanuts compared to office work and regular users ( watching youtube, arguing on the internet etc)

            i don’t understand what you mean exactly by performance when talking about a DE ( responsiveness, ram and cpu usage ? …). in terms of cpu and ram usage i’m pretty sure that kde consumes more and in terms responsiveness i would assume that kde is better but how much ( a difference between 5 s and 2 s is huge but from let’s say 80 nanosecond to 60 is just for benchmarks and won’t be noticed in real world usage)

            what really holds us back is the lack of commercial software compatibility and at least decent alternatives compared to industry standards

            oh yeah, and nvidia drivers + wifi and bluetouth

            • Communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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              10 days ago

              but i don’t think that this is a big problem for most for now since our user base is small so there is much less malware and targeted attacks (well as long as you are not a high profile employee at a company with vast data access privileges )

              Security is not as huge of a problem on linux as it is on windows for sure. But EVERY SINGLE proprietary app you use can snoop on EVERYTHING. and I do not trust proprietary apps, beginners especially will use a ton of proprietary software. Remember that we’re recommending to a beginner, not a linux evangelist who is willing to do anything to make linux/foss work for them.

              i don’t understand what you mean exactly by performance when talking about a DE ( responsiveness, ram and cpu usage ? …). in terms of cpu and ram usage i’m pretty sure that kde consumes more and in terms responsiveness i would assume that kde is better but how much ( a difference between 5 s and 2 s is huge but from let’s say 80 nanosecond to 60 is just for benchmarks and won’t be noticed in real world usage)

              If you use KDE on a laptop from like 2002 it will be a HORRIBLE experience, they use way too much ram, way too much rendering (with animations and whatnot), absolute cpu and gpu hogs for a machine from back then. that’s pretty much the reason xfce and lxde exist. It’ll also be real bad on cinnamon. Maybe this is better now, I haven’t tried in a while.

              The only reason I see for a beginner not to choose KDE over xfce is if they have a laptop from the 32 bit era. Elsewise, KDE if you use windows, Gnome if you use macos. The development speed alone and the fact that they have proper funding means in 20 years they’ll probably still be around, cinnamon development is nearly dead by comparison, we shouldn’t be encouraging people to use significantly less supported software unless there’s a compelling reason, and for cinnamon, there really just isn’t. People won’t want to relearn everything when cinnamon breaks for them, might as well start on the most well supported stuff for all hardware.

              I personally don’t use KDE, but I don’t think we should be recommending anything but KDE/Gnome to beginners without very good reason. Sure, use whatever you want, but that isn’t a valid course of action for someone who doesn’t even know where to start, and the obvious answer for where to start is KDE.

              I think many people here have been linux users for so long that they forget their solution isn’t the best choice for beginners.

              • mr_right@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                10 days ago

                Security is not as huge of a problem on linux as it is on windows for sure. But EVERY SINGLE proprietary app you use can snoop on EVERYTHING. and I do not trust proprietary apps, beginners especially will use a ton of proprietary software. Remember that we’re recommending to a beginner, not a linux evangelist who is willing to do anything to make linux/foss work for them.

                i don’t trust them either but from what i have seen most don’t care

                The only reason I see for a beginner not to choose KDE over xfce is if they have a laptop from the 32 bit era.

                this is a bit of a stretch

                the development rate is a deciding factor for sure and i agree that we shouldn’t encourage using software that is considered “obsolete”

                i don’t agree on everything and maybe you’re right i still don’t get why they dropped support for kde but still support MATE

      • James R Kirk@startrek.website
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        10 days ago

        I agree with you completely. No disrespect to Mint, but immutability is (IMO) possibly the most important advancement for Linux adoption in its entire history. I would love to see more distros release immutable versions.

  • John@lemmy.ml
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    11 days ago

    Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it… leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can’t fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.

    This was my experience as well … 20 years ago. I’ve not had many of these issues over the past few years using any distro. I used Debian for a couple years and now I’m on Arch. Really, it just works for me…

    TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      11 days ago

      TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.

      That seems to be the consensus from reading the other comments!

      • themadcodger@kbin.earth
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        11 days ago

        Yeah, I didn’t want to be not supportive of your choice of distros, but my immediate thought was not Ubuntu… I use it headless for some homelab servers, but nowadays as far as desktops go, Ubuntu is not it.

        Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework, and it has been pretty set it and forget it. They’re all “atomic” desktops in that it’s hard to be able change the underlaying important parts of your computer, while you have free reign on all the bits that aren’t important to keep the lights on. Updates happen frequently, but don’t touch your files on top, so it’s always the latest, and if something does break, you can easily boot up into the last image you were on.

        If you’re not looking to tweak your computer too much and just want it to run, I’d recommend Aurora or Bluefin depending on your desktop preferences.

        • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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          10 days ago

          Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework,

          I know nothing about these… but I just installed Aurora in Boxes to try, and damn, it’s nice. Maybe a little “too busy”, but it’s got everything I could ask for out of the box (no need for extension manager). I might replace Mint with Aurora on my MiniPC, but if it’s as unbreakable as they say, it may replace Fedora.

          Right now, Fedora has still be very stable, but since I’m staring from scratch, I might as well get it right the first time. I’ll be experimenting more to see which I prefer.

          • themadcodger@kbin.earth
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            10 days ago

            If it makes you feel any better it sort of is Fedora. Fedora has both original and atomic flavors. Someone took the atomic flavor of Fedora (which comes as a blank slate) and added in some quality of life changes. Nothing permanent, just tweaking some settings and preinstalling some programs. And then called it as Aurora.

            And the only difference between Aurora and Bluefin is KDE (very customizable and Windows like) vs Gnome (customizable through widgets, but not enough if you’re a power tweaker and more of a Mac style desktop environments). And Bazzite is the same, but gamer focused (I installed it on my steamdeck).

  • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 days ago

    Running a framework 16 with FedoraKDE and before that a 4gb ram 2015 toshiba satellite (in 2024) running Fedora (regular Gnome) and haven’t had one of these issues. Most issues I have had were caused by me, every now and again I run into a regular old bug in something and half the time that gets fixed pretty quick.

    I wish I could help, but we just have opposite experiences unfortunately. That said, because of this I don’t think it’s “linux,” or I’d likely have at least similar experiences.

    OH for a while I did have a bug where VLC would stutter playing video and nobody had a fix, so I uninstalled/reinstalled VLC and it works now. Idk, I’ve had shit like that happen on windows too though, it’s basically the software version of power cycling hardware when it acts up.

  • fennec@lemm.ee
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    11 days ago

    Id switch to mint, most windows like and all the knowledge youve learned will work on it. If you want true stability go Debian.

    • electric_nan@lemmy.ml
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      11 days ago

      Just want to chime in that there is a Linux Mint Debian Edition. Nice stability, sidesteps criticisms of Ubuntu, and has the polish of Mint

  • 0xtero@beehaw.org
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    11 days ago

    If it’s for work, I’d suggest using whatever works for you best. Sounds incredibly frustrating so I don’t know why’d you be so set on ditching windows. Use the tools that work for you. Having said that, I’ve been running Linux since early 0.99 kernels and Debian since 1.3 and stability is really unmatched these days.

    Your screen flicker issues with browser sound like hardware acceleration related bugs and I’d hazard a quess that random freezes and reboots have something to do with graphics drivers as well. But of course it’s impossible to tell without logs, which you didn’t provide.

  • dblsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
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    11 days ago

    Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted… all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.

    Well, I’m pretty sure I had this happen once or twice in the recent past after wake from suspend I think, but it might be that my CPU is just one of the faulty intel ones.

    Either way the rest of this does not reflect my experience at all. Try distrohopping, I feel like you’ll find one that you like and doesn’t have these issues. openSuSE is always one of my suggestions, it was the one that I used for a long time when I started out as well, but tbh I’m out of touch with the more mainstream distros, I’ve only touched Gentoo and NixOS in the past >5 years. (I also specifically recommend against using Ubuntu.)

    Then I’ll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won’t.

    Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I’ll get a popup asking to wait or quit.

    Check journalctl --user, and also htop, specifically the process state, for the last one (you mention a NAS, is it perhaps stuck on IO? I’m in a fucked network where that regularly happens with my NAS.)

  • marauding_gibberish142@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    11 days ago

    I work on Linux and use Linux at home. I’ll try to go through the problems you mentioned:

    1. Just run the update command again in the GUI or terminal. If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to dig into apt with verbose logs but I haven’t had apt break on me for over a decade unless I deleted something I shouldn’t have.
    2. Is Firefox installed as a snap/flatpak? That only happens with me occasionally when I installed flatpaks, they’re just slower. Canonical can be a real arse about this stuff, they might switch packages to snaps without telling you and you might only come to know about it once you dig deeper.
    3. All of these issues seem to related to your storage medium. Is the SSD OK? Open up the process monitor, sort by ascending order of disk writes/reads and open your applications one by one to see which one of them is the culprit.
    4. Rebooting suddenly is not normal. Unfortunately, you’ll have to go through logs for this one. Simple ones are dmesg and journalctl, we can dig deeper into them if you want to.

    If I had my hands on your laptop I’d be running a vulnerability scan by now but I don’t think the problem is serious enough to warrant it.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      11 days ago

      Thank you.

      Just run the update command again in the GUI or terminal. If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to dig into apt with verbose logs but I haven’t had apt break on me for over a decade unless I deleted something I shouldn’t have.
      

      Nothing needed to be updated. One package was “deferred”, and that was the “ubuntu-drivers-common”.

      Is Firefox installed as a snap/flatpak? That only happens with me occasionally when I installed flatpaks, they’re just slower. Canonical can be a real arse about this stuff, they might switch packages to snaps without telling you and you might only come to know about it once you dig deeper.
      

      Default Firefox, and I just checked, and it’s listed as Snap package.

      All of these issues seem to related to your storage medium. Is the SSD OK? Open up the process monitor, sort by ascending order of disk writes/reads and open your applications one by one to see which one of them is the culprit.
      

      Full chkdsk was performed before installing Linux on my SSD. In the Western Digital utility (in Windows), everything tested OK, too. No issues in the S.M.A.R.T. logs, either.

      Rebooting suddenly is not normal. Unfortunately, you’ll have to go through logs for this one. Simple ones are dmesg and journalctl, we can dig deeper into them if you want to.
      

      I don’t know if it actually rebooted, or if it just closed everything and returned on the login screen. I wasn’t home when it happened, I just came back to that :(

      But that was days ago. And it hasn’t happened since.

      I’ll be running a proper memtest shortly, and will post an update once that’s done.

  • muusemuuse@lemm.ee
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    11 days ago

    You need to stop worrying about “official support.” You aren’t a business so it doesn’t matter for you. There is more support out there online for free than you realize. There’s nothing magical framework does for you that doesn’t get ported out everywhere else eventually anyway. Stop limiting yourself like that.

    That being said, Ubuntu is built in Debian. Debian is an incredibly solid and stable distro. Ubuntu does do a few questionable things with it but it’s still very reliable. If you have problems with stability, it’s very unlikely Ubuntu is the problem unless you did something so incredibly stupid to it support wouldn’t help you anyway.

    I have a theory. Windows can dance around memory corruption issues in ways Linux just refuses to do. Windows will misbehave in strange ways trying to make things work until it just can’t anymore. Linux is more of a binary thing. It works or it doesn’t. It’s not going to play pretend for you. It refuses. Linus has an obscene hand gesture for your hardware.

    I want you to get a copy of memtest86+ and boot it off a flash drive. Then just let it beat the shit out of your CPU and ram for a couple hours.

    Framework laptops are generally Intel. Intel hasn’t been making the best stuff over the past few years. It’s possible your cpu might be affected by a flaw Intel tried to cover up for a while. If it has it, nothing in earth will ever make that chip reliable. It’s not fixable. It will only get worse with time no matter what OS you use.

  • Abnorc@lemm.ee
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    11 days ago

    Do your issues appear on a fresh install? At my admittedly limited level of expertise, I’d probably start from there. If a clean install works properly, then something that’s happening later is messing it up. You’d have to keep track of changes you make to your system and check for issues as you go.

    If a clean install is borked from the get-go, maybe try different distros. Since Framework supports Fedora, I’m surprised that anything would go wrong.

    I don’t know if Framework offers any support or warranty, but you could check with them too.

    • Showroom7561@lemmy.caOP
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      11 days ago

      Do your issues appear on a fresh install?

      Before, during, and after a fresh install, depending on the day I’ve tried! LOL

      I’m going to do a proper memtest as others have suggested. Then I may just start fresh again, perhaps with another distro. Thank god it’s Friday, so I’ve got a few days to sort this out. haha

  • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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    11 days ago

    NAS shared folders

    now that is something that can easily make the system unstable, especially a laptop that will disconnect from the network at least ince in a while. my experience is with KDE, that if there’s an unresponsive SMB mount 8n the filesystem, the whole KDE plasma environment fill freeze left and right, maybe with the exception of the window manager. but I have experienced this with other programs too. I suspect they all do filesystem accesses on the main thread and that’s why when a directory read hangs, they can’t do anything even handle clicksuntil the read times out.

    its infuriating honestly, in a sense. of course, I have got all my money back lol. but it’s like nobody is testing software with SMB shares, but I guess probably same goes for NFS, SSHFS or anything remote

  • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works
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    11 days ago

    Where did you get this laptop from? Did you buy it new or used?

    The reason why I ask is because it sounds like you have hardware issues.

    • trolololol@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Yep, the Firefox thing is weird. I’d run a memory test . Does this laptop do the same thing with Windows?

      Also op mentions 20 years, were your other experiences like this?