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

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Showroom7561 to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Another potential cause for random slowdown, errors and crashes could be overheating. Check that the fans are spinning and airflow is unobstructed. I don't remember from the top of my head and I'm not near a computer but maybe somebody else remembers his to check that all sensors are detected and operational.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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 2 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

The problem is, Ubuntu from my understanding will try to install the snap version even if you explicitly are installing the deb version, including replacing a deb version with a snap when you update.

I've not experienced this personally as I stopped using Ubuntu before they started doing snaps, maybe they've gotten better about that, but I don't trust a corpo run distro to not enshittify at every opportunity, so...

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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

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.
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.
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.
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 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Just FYI. My family has used linux for 25 years on many systems and we do not have stability issues. We use mostly Ubuntu or Debian.

Have no idea why your having issues. Could distro or hardware related. Also are you sure your storage media is good.

[–] Showroom7561 3 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Just FYI. My family has used linux for 25 on many systems and we do not have stability issues. We use mostly Ubuntu or Debian.

Have no idea why your having issues. Could distro or hardware related. Also are you sure your storage media is good.

This has been my experience with Linux over at least six different laptop and desktop PCs. As I said, I've been dabbling for decades, and always have to go back to windows because of how Linux crashes and burns for me.

Then again, I do usually stick to Ubuntu and distros based off it, so maybe that's my problem. LOL

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

I don't know about that. I've been running Mint, an Ubuntu based distro, for over a decade now on tons of machines with no stability issues at all. But then again I make sure to buy hardware that is known to support linux well. All of my laptops have been from Tuxedo except for this last one which is a Framework.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Just thinking what possibilities. Some thoughts.

We always use Ubuntu LTS and do not install or upgrade a release until is out for 6 to 9 months. For Debian we use stable.
Make certain your install media is good and also the computer storge media.
Keep the system updates current.
Use packages installed from the standard repo and supported by the security team.

Not sure what else.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Linux has always been the way you've described across many different distros for me over the years.

By far the most stable for me was Fedora. I've been running CachyOS over the last year or so and it's been solid.

Until today. For some reason KDE takes forever to startup now. A few apps have this problem as well.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Like @[email protected] just said, run memory test.

What hw do you have in that laptop?

something went wrong, but we're not sure what it is.

Check the system journal with

sudo journalctl -e

[–] Showroom7561 2 points 4 days ago (4 children)

What hw do you have in that laptop?

It's the 11th Gen Framework 13 running:

Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 , integrated Intel XE graphics chip
Western Digital Black 770 2TB SSD
32gb ram (16GB x 2) Crucial DDR4-3200

sudo journalctl -e

This generates a lot of stuff. Anything in particular that I should post?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Mint also has issues :/ I've been having weird bugs where the mouse and keyboard just stop responding randomly.... Searching for it you find other people with the same issue with no resolution

It really sucks, because something utterly basic as mouse keyboard should not be an issue

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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.

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