Budgie 20.04 LTS random freezes with no clear cause

Budgie Desktop
1

Hi there,

I’ve been using Budgie as my daily driver for some time now and I’m lovin’ it. As a Linux beginner, it really is an approachable distro.

However, I’ve recently come across a stupid issue of random freezes here and there. Well, at first I thought that it was solely connected to watching videos and/or hardware acceleration, since it 99% of times happened while watching YouTube or videos from other platforms.

However, I was working on my PC today and it froze again while doing nothing related to videos. I also turned off hardware acceleration in both Brave (Chromium) and Firefox, but didn’t help with freezes that happen when videos play.

So, my question is:

  1. How to debug it?
    I tried looking at logs, but I’m a Linux beginner and I can’t figure out if anything’s wrong.

  2. How to fix it?

I have this intuition that it is somehow connected either to the graphics card (NVidia) or the RAM, or maybe even with sudden temperature rise during CPU/GPU peaks, but can’t quite nail it.

What do you suggest?

  • A
2

Just to say I’ve been seeing this happen. I have disabled the NVidia drivers on my machine as its too old for the version avaialble, so I’m using the Nouvea drivers.

It seems to be correlated with using web browsers but as I spend 80%+ time using them it might just be a random coincidence.

There is a term command you can use to view logs following a freeze (after restart). Posting that may help someone identify an issue.

journalctl -ae -full

You can save that to a file using unix ‘>’ operator

journalctl -ae -full > mylog.txt

At the point of ‘freeze’ it may be possible to switch to a terminal prompt using

Ctrl-Alt F4

This won’t work in the case of a full on freeze, but if you still get some mouse pointer activity it might work.

You can then log in with username and pass and use the journalctl command.

You may then be able to restart the window manager with

sudo service lightdm restart

1 Like
3

Hey @Blackhill, thanks for the suggestion re: journalctl, I’ll try it next time it freezes.

Unfortunately, almost each freeze is complete i.e. no mouse movement, no console available, not even REISUB works. What remains is the frozen last screen and 1 second or so of the last sound that goes on repeat.

How can something freeze it SO fundamentally that nothing works?!

4

if it is nvidia related - then thats a bug in the proprietary driver - by their nature nothing can be done because nvidia controls their driver.

Have you looked to see if there are later drivers offered through Menu - Additional Drivers?

Have you tried uninstalling the nvidia drivers and just using the opensource nouveau drivers?

5

You know, the weird thing is that I also have some games installed that demand high GPU horsepower (surely a lot more than playing YouTube videos), but still the PC doesn’t freeze during gaming.

I’ll try with the Nouveau drivers just to troubleshoot, but would like to keep the proprietary ones for gaming. But will test it for sure.

6

I think I may be seeing the same thing, except I’m actually on Linux Mint 20 now (same Ubuntu 20.04 base). I see the freezing in Firefox almost exclusively. I’m not using anything nvidia - my laptop is all Intel.