Brave Browser tabs + Discord crash frequently on Fedora 35

Hello everybody, this isn’t exactly a deal-breaker for me, but is quite annoying. I’m running a DIY edition using an SSD, 8 GB RAM stick, and WiFi card from my previous laptop. On the SSD is a dual-boot Windows 10/Fedora setup, and I upgraded from Fedora 34 to 35 as soon as I turned on the Framework for the first time.

I usually have Brave and Discord running concurrently, as I’ve did on my old laptop without any problems. However, ever since getting the Framework and upgrading the OS, I’ll frequently have individual Browser tabs + Honey and Metamask extensions crash along with Discord. The way it always plays out is: I’ll restart my computer or turn it on, use it for a few hours, then I get a notification that a tab has crashed. As I continue using the laptop without restarting, I get more and more tabs crashing. Eventually, Metamask and Honey will crash around 15 minutes after reloading them. Discord crashes every so often in addition, sometimes simultaneously with a crash from Brave.

(On a side note: also experienced freezing and crashing with VSCode when I was working on a project for college. Other than that, haven’t been using any other applications.)

The crash reports always show Brave encountering a SIGSEGV and Discord encountering a ‘SIGILL’. Additionally, it appears I’m also receiving crash reports from the kernel but they lack detail. If anyone needs me to show some crash reports to see exactly what’s going on, I’d be glad to post screenshots.

So far, I’ve tried disabling hardware acceleration on Brave, and switching from Wayland to Xorg, neither of which have helped. I’ve tried disabling extensions. Haven’t been real thorough with this admittedly, but I’ve a feeling Metamask might be a source of the problem somehow. How it might affect Discord is beyond me, however.

Also ran memtest86 to see if it was an issue with my RAM. I’m no expert, but I did get a big green ‘PASS’ at the end, so I’m pretty sure RAM issues are ruled out.

Way I see it, could be some kind of compatibility issue with my SSD and Framework, some update with Fedora 35 that doesn’t jibe too well with these applications, or maybe some setting on both applications that’s causing issues. I’d be grateful to anyone who can help me solve this.

When you swapped the SSD from your previous laptop did you do a fresh install of Fedora or are you using the same installation you had on your last machine? If so, that in and of itself can cause all sorts of weird issues just from previous drivers that might be loaded and different expected behaviors the OS is looking for from old hardware. For instance, this report seem similar to the problems your experiencing, but relies on whether or not you have NVIDIA drivers still installed from your old hardware.

Outside of that though, it seems odd that your problem seems consistent with just web browsers. I would try out some other browsers like Firefox or Chromium to see if the crashes persist and if you can get more verbose logs from them. Discord’s app is essentially a browser locked into Discord’s webapp and I believe VSCode is written with HTML and Javascript. It might be worth trying to pin down whether or not your system is having unexpected problems trying to handle those languages. Since it is happening to multiple browsers on your system, I don’t think MetaMask would be the source of your issue.

When you swapped the SSD from your previous laptop did you do a fresh install of Fedora or are you using the same installation you had on your last machine? If so, that in and of itself can cause all sorts of weird issues just from previous drivers that might be loaded and different expected behaviors the OS is looking for from old hardware.

Yeah, it’s the same installation as my previous laptop, so if you’re right then it could be a driver issue. If so, how do I go about finding the problematic driver(s) and replacing it/them?

Unfortunately, the most painless way to do it would be to back up your files and re-install the OS. This way you only download the drivers you need onto a fresh start and you don’t have to worry about hunting down packages and flushing configs.

If you’re really determined, you’ll need to pretty much compare/contrast the hardware/driver differences of the Framework and your old machine and “sudo dnf remove” the packages you no longer need. My first guess would be a video driver conflict, unless you’re last laptop was another 11th gen intel with their new integrated graphics system.

It would also probably be good to flush the configs for utilities like pipewire so it’s not running old configs for old hardware.

Out of curiosity, how is your Windows Installation faring? I had moved a Windows drive between computers before and found it tobe even worse when it comes to moving between hardware. I had gotten it to work, but I never stopped seeing weird issues until I bit the bullet and just re-installed it.

Unfortunately, the most painless way to do it would be to back up your files and re-install the OS. This way you only download the drivers you need onto a fresh start and you don’t have to worry about hunting down packages and flushing configs.

Well, I did have a friend who’s been bugging me to install Arch. I could see this as motivation to give it a shot, depending on whether or not that’s less painful than simply trying to root out the problematic packages in Fedora.

Out of curiosity, how is your Windows Installation faring?

I wish I could tell you, but I haven’t really used Windows 10 since getting the Framework. I don’t really use Windows 10 anymore, unless it’s something I’m not able to do natively on Linux, which is rare. At some point I was planning on deleting Windows off my disk altogether. But if I’m encountering driver issues on Fedora, can’t imagine Windows would fare much better either. Might be high time for me to finally toss it.

Doing a fresh install of anything is going to be less painful than rooting out probelmatic packages, even if you just decide to re-inastall Fedora. I can say that I haven’t really had any major problems like yours using Fedora with KDE/Plasma, but I’ve seen some people on here using Arch as well.

Fair enough, I’ve replaced Windows with Arch Linux, and so far it’s been working great! Eventually, I’ll move all my files over from Fedora and delete it entirely.