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Showroom7561 @lemmy.ca

I'm committing to Linux, but it's so unstable. Any suggestions?

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

178 comments

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

    That doesn't sound right.

    Start with Linux Mint. I've helped Boomers use it. My dad has been using it as his daily driver for almost 5 years and he doesn't know the difference between an OS and a Word Processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice "Linux").

    • Start with Linux Mint.

      On this laptop, Mint was even worse, unfortunately!

      I do have it running on a miniPC hooked up to my TV, though. Very basic stuff like video streaming. :(

    • 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.

  • 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).

    • 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.

      • 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

      • 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.

      • 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

      • 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.

    • this! and whilst i don’t know the hardware support for new framework models on mint, i recon it’s pretty good.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • Usually with Linux, once you start out you're gonna get a ton of issues and you'll have to troubleshoot them one by one. However, afterwards it should just be a smooth sailing.

    Also as a word of warning from my personal experience, official support isn't something you should be that concerned about. When it comes to software, when some corporation makes some official version for a specific distribution (like Ubuntu), it usually is made by some B-team and doesn't work that great. If the program is good, it should be available on most major distros rather than just "an official version for just one" if that makes sense.

    Also good call - if one distro is causing a fuck ton of issues, just give another one out. The main difference for users between distros is what kind of software setup they are going with, and some setups are just prone to issues on some hardware or wasn't tested properly. Still, I do hope Fedora treats you better.

  • I started using Linux more or less full-time in 2014. I find it to be just as "stable" as Windows or OS-X, which is to say: it's stable until you do something that makes it not stable.

    If you're staying in the mainstream, using a "stable release" from a big distro (Ubuntu, Debian, there are others...) and waiting at least 6 months after the release of that stable release before using it, I have found Ubuntu to be just as stable as Windows or OS-X. You might want to use an unstable app, that can be a problem in any OS, but granted: there aren't as many "stable" apps to choose from in Linux as Windows.

    OS-X and their apps have burned me hard, repeatedly, for things that Windows and Linux had under control 10 years earlier.

    The major difference in my WIndows vs Linux experiences has been: when you want something to work and it just doesn't, in Windows you have to shrug your shoulders and explain to your customers: It just doesn't work, there's nothing we can do. In Linux, you have the option to do the heavy lifting and make it work. It will frequently not be worth the effort, but if you're really determined you can fix just about anything in Linux.

  • 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.)

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • The latest Ubuntu defaults to using Wayland. On my Framework, it would freeze the whole box every few days. I switched to Xorg, and it was much better. (It's an option on the login screen - just clock the little cog and choose Xorg before you log in.)

  • Great guidance here and I know you want to stick with Ubuntu, but but if you tire of trying to fix it try a different distro before you give up.

    Lots of people swear by Ubuntu, but for others (like me) it's nothing but trouble. For instance, I get errors when running the latest version of Ubuntu on a current laptop that runs Debian 12 perfectly, and a previous Ubuntu load on one of our laptops (tried with a new SSD) had so many issues that I gave up and restored the Mint backup.

    By contrast, we have 2 different laptops and one old desktop that run Linux Mint almost flawlessly. "Almost" means a system lock up every 3-4 months and the inability to wake from sleep for the desktop. Debian 12 was a bit more difficult to get fully working, but since the initial install it has been been completely stable with zero problems. We have one laptop that is running Windows 11 and it has more problems than any of the Linux machines.

    Fixing problems is a great way to learn, but if it's not the way you want to spend your time you may be heading down the wrong path. Unless you have a hardware issue you should be able to find a distro that has few or none of the problems you've been fighting.

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

    • 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

    • Mint

      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.

  • What do you mean by unstable? I don't get what this means. Install? Perhaps choosing a graphical install if available for your distribution of choice. I've heard nice things about Mint (can't tell, I'm using Artix, and Guix is in my plans).

    That said, US or EU are not that different. Actually the EU is little by little deteriorating the data privacy it used to say it protected, but moreover, even if the data is kept in EU, what does it prevent US gov or corps to get access to the data? Did people forget about the 5 eyes, the extended ones (not sure how many, there were several extensions)? Did people forget that no matter the current differences, the EU and the US are allies (not just politically) any ways?

    Linux (kernel) itself has already identified itself as a US org, since it complies with the US requirements and law, to the point of banning developers from countries the US doesn't like to be cooperating with US orgs (whether gov or not).

    So, focusing on country based software developers shouldn't be the main motivation. Looking for free/libre software if possible, so that you get some freedoms of yours sort of intended to be protected through licenses, or if not available then open source, is what we should be looking for. On top of that, communication software should be e2ee, and if possible distributed or peer to peer, or at least decentralized, and so on. Also we tend to forget that the data kept in the cloud is no longer yours anymore, no matter the cloud, neither the country, and if in need to keep personal data on some cloud we should make sure it's encrypted, but still the data keeps being the cloud owner hands, so having personal backups is important, and clouds usually don't advertise what metadata they leak.

    Having said that Fedora sounds OK to me while Ubuntu sounds too commercial to me and actually now a days looking for users to get packages from its own "app store". Instead of the "country of origin" for a distro, perhaps more importantly it is to see what your needs are, for example do you prefer rolling release vs. stable releases? Do you prefer vanila kind of packages (as close to upstream as possible) or your fine with the distro making changes to the upstream software as that serves better your purposes? How user friendly the distro is? Though perhaps you're out of options if the framework laptop requires firmware or patches not found upstream, then you might better stay with the "officially supported" distros, unless what you miss by not having such firmware or patches is something you can live with, but usually x86 laptops are "easily" used with gnu+linux on top, except for some drivers not fully working with your hardware or missing firmware, but people usually still uses those laptops with gnu+linux on top. For arm laptops (I believe framework has laptos with arm CPUs, and actually is offering some initial ones with risc-v cpus) that tends to be a little more involved and I personally have no experience with that, and actually I'm waiting for a cheap enough and not so low level risc-v laptop or mini-pc to start experimenting with it (not all distributions support arm and even less risc-v).

    Again, I've heard nice things of Mint, particularly for people new to gnu+linux, and it's not a rolling release distribution. Though I'm one of those thinking that rolling relase distributions are easy to live with, at least not on the server spectrum (there are actually servers running on top of rolling release distributions such as Arch, but that's not the majority of them) given they can't afford reboots (very few updates actually require reboot on gnu+linux, linux/kernel itself being one of those which better get a reboot ASAP but not necessarily immediately) or changes requiring a service to drop even for a little while. But with rolling releases one doesn't have to deal with big differences between distribution major versions upgrades, and the changes requiring using intervention when upgrading packages are distributed on time, so no need to focus on a lot of them at once.

    Just my two cents, :)

  • Since you say the thing is working fine on Windows, there's almost certainly a bug or several. I'd say probably a driver in the kernel, but could be something else. Changing distro or kernel version does sometimes help with that sort of thing, mainly because another distro may have newer or older kernels and other software, and bugs get both introduced and fixed every release.

    Freezing issues can have lots reasons, including buggy apps, RAM exhaustion due to memory leaks, bugs in the graphics drivers or graphics stack more generally, various blocking I/O things taking unexpectedly long due to network issues or faulty hardware or drivers.

    If you want a chance to figure this out, you probably need to run things in the terminal, like installing software updates through the apt and snap (?) cli utilities. GUIs are notoriously shit at reporting unexpected errors, whereas all sorts of programs (including GUI apps if you start them in a terminal) do regularly print warnings and error messages to stderr, which will show up in a terminal. This is because it's easy for the programmers to do that with just single printf() (etc.) line.

    For driver issues, looking at the kernel logs can sometimes show interesting things as well. I will say that, when looking at logs or terminal output, there often are warnings that are completely unrelated and/or harmless, and that's not necessarily obvious to the user.

    If this is a software issue, framework imho shouldn't advertise their stuff being able to run Ubuntu if they cannot stay on top of issues that are happening in this configuration.

  • Arch also can absolutely be installed just as quickly as any other distro if you use the archinstall script. I used it recently to install KDE plasma onto a Chromebook from 2017 and everything worked exactly as expected, I haven't had any issues with stability so far. Can absolutely be done in under half an hour. It ofc doesn't come with the advantage of understanding exactly how your system is set up, like you would if you did it yourself.

    The last time I did that (slightly different setup with xfce) though I broke it somehow and ended up with if freezing often when booting, although I'm still not sure if that was a hardware problem or not, but it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. I also broke something with the audio jack somehow around then during an update, but chromebooks have weird audio drivers and you need to use this script maintained by (afaik) one person in their spare time. Anyways I would expect a framework laptop to handle it better as it's newer and more common hardware.

178 comments