My friend is the one having this issue. I’ve been trying to help him figure it out for the last few months. He’s new to Linux as of this year. I’m no expert, but I’ve been using Linux for a while, so we’ve been trying anything I can think of whenever I get the chance to sit down and call.
To answer questions:
@knipp30
When did it start? - Sometime in June or July of this year. At first it was just a random freeze here or there with no apparent pattern, so we didn’t do much about it.
What resolves it? - A hard reboot. The freeze either causes the desktop to stutter or freeze completely. When it stutters, sometimes you can wait it out and sometimes it eventually freezes completely. Another thing I noticed is that the first thing to go is mouse control. When it’s not completely frozen, you can sometimes navigate by keyboard for a few seconds (which acts smoothly until it freezes as well).
When does it mostly occur? - When doing homework. The problem was so occasional before that it wasn’t really a problem. However, since my friend started up classes, it’s become a consistent headache. Ironically, we’ve tried heavy workloads such as gaming and watching 4k videos. So far as I understand, it almost never happens when he’s doing that. But when he has his development environment open (primarily Firefox, Zed, and a terminal running live-server through npm) it happens regularly. It’s not tied to this specific setup though. It’s happened while using VS Code or even just an editor like Gedit.
@jared_kidd
Have you tried a different distro? - Yes. Originally, he was using Manjaro since that is what I run on most of my devices and am familiar with. That, and he’s a gamer, so I figured since the steam deck was arch based, he’d have better luck with something similar. The first thing we tried when things got annoying was a clean reinstall of Manjaro. When that didn’t work, he tried PopOs. It doesn’t seem to be distro dependent. We’ve also tried rolling back a few kernels to see if it was an issue that was introduced this summer. It doesn’t seem to make a difference.
It would be a good idea to run some memtest86 passes - Thanks for the suggestion, I’ve downloaded it and am learning how to use it on my own computer so I can help him with it later today. If there’s anything specific I should watch for that is not obvious or easily found in the documentation, let me know.
Side note:
The reason we’ve been monitoring hardware was to see if there were any strange spikes to indicate a thermal or memory issue. I’ve searched all over this forum and the web for similar issues. The only two that had anything were hardware issues. One had thermal issues that required a mainboard replacement while the other had to do with specific cards in certain expansion slots causing the freeeze issue.
When we first started monitoring temps, I thought we were fine until my freind pointed out that one of the sensor is regularly in the 80=90+ Celsius range. We’re thinking that it’s one of the cpu cores, but I am not familiar enough with psensor to be certain. I was just trying to deduct from the sensor details such as chip and ID.
