UI freeze with Cinnamon or KDE on Framework 16 Ai 300

Framework Laptop 16 Linux
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1

I got my Laptop 16 with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and RTX 5070 recently. After trying a few other options that didn’t work, I settled on installing the plain Ubuntu 25.10 desktop, but I don’t really care for the GNOME desktop.

There seems to some issue that causes the GUI to freeze after a short while at least with Ubuntu Cinnamon and Kubuntu, possibly others. The mouse moves and CTRL-ALT-Fx keys work and the command line is usable, but the GUI is otherwise completely unreactive. I’ve found some posts online with people having similar issues with ADM CPUs, but I couldn’t find anything that would say how to fix the issue.

Linux Mint 22.3 didn’t ever boot up to the GUI.

Any ideas on how to get Cinnamon or KDE to work?

2

keep in min that AI 300 series laptop can only load Linux with Linux Kernel 6.14 and up at least, so any linux distro bellow it will give you black screen and won’t show anything since it’s a conflict with AMD drivers :confused:

3

Ubuntu 26.04 is just out. I tried both Ubuntu Cinnamon & Kubuntu 26.04. Cinnamon still froze after a few minutes, but Kubuntu worked fine. Instead of a fresh reinstall, I upgraded first to 26.04, then apt install kubuntu-desktop, followed by a thorough cleanup of all of the gnome stuff. Working good so far. Plus the NPU drivers work out of the box!

4

Had a similar keyboard/mouse-button freezing issue on Ubuntu Cinnamon 25.10 with my Laptop 16 (AI 300), though in my case, even the modifier keys would freeze (only the power button still worked).

There’s an issue with running X11 on Ryzen AI 300, though this wouldn’t explain your freezes on Kubuntu 25.10 (KDE Plasma uses Wayland).

@clem from Linux Mint posted a workaround for the X11 issue here:

Unfortunately, if you’re seeing freezes on Ubuntu Cinnamon 26.04, it seems the issue still hasn’t been fixed upstream (as of Linux 7.0).

5

I have the same exact hardware. I also ran into problems with Linux Mint 22.3 not working at all on it. I ultimately settled on Ubuntu 25.10 Cinnamon, and it “works” but it is quite fragile, especially around the coordination of the AMD GPU and the NVIDIA GPU. Getting the right drivers in the right order with the right parameters proved, challenging. But I did eventually get it, and it’s working stable, more or less for now. I’m very very cautious about doing kernel upgrades though, or even graphic driver updates, because I’ve had to force rollback more than once after some update breaks it.

I did try to upgrade to Ubuntu 26.04 Cinnamon Beta a little over a month ago, thinking 26.04 would solve all the ‘on the edge of a cliff’ issues I was having with 25.10 and that turned out to be an absolute nightmare. Nothing but issues. I decided to reinstall 25.10 Cinnamon and 90% of the issues went away and I fought through the last 10% to get back to where I was mostly stable, and that’s where I’m at right now; 25.10, mostly working but wary of any kernel or nvidia or amd gpu driver/package updates, and looking at 26.04 but not really ready to spend days fighting w/ my laptop again.

From what I understand, Cinnamon is not quite ready for Wayland and 26.04 uses Wayland, making Ubuntu 26.04 Cinnamon edition unstable. There’s ways to switch back to xorg and you need to switch to lightdm instead of gdm if I understand the forums properly, but I’ve not gone down that rabbit hole yet.

I can include some info about my current Ubuntu 25.10 Cinnamon installation, on the same exact hardware you have, if you think it can help you? It can include what packages I have installed, what kernel, any kernel parameters I have set, etc. I will say that the AI helped a lot, cursor agent or claude code turned out to be quite useful in diagnosing my system issues, going through my logs, and customizing things a little just to get my laptop working right.

A week or so ago some update semi-broke things where my exernal monitor, which I had connected via a USB-C to DP cable, plugged into the back into the RTX 5070, the external monitor suddenly stopped working after a reboot. Even rolling back to the previous kernel didn’t seem to fix things, which really annoyed me. Worked fine in Windows 11 though (I dual boot). But I learned if I connected the monitor to my side USB-C connector (right side, slot 4) the monitor would be detected and work again. It’s frustrating that what used to work suddenly stopped working but whatever, right now I have:

  1. 240w Power brick connector plugged into the back, into the nvidia GPU
  2. Dell Thunderbolt 3 dock plugged into the USB 4 module in slot 1. I only use the dock for its USB connections, to my keyboard/mouse/speakers/microphone/webcam
  3. External monitor connected to the USB 4 module in slot 4, it’s a C to DP cable.

I think I’m going to wait until Linux Mint 23 comes out, I suspect by then the Mint team will work out a lot of the issues with Cinnamon and Wayland or they’ll default it to Xorg etc. but it’ll all be working and stable, and I should be able to install Mint 23 cleanly on this laptop and have minimal issues.

```
❯ uname -a
Linux drhorrible 6.17.0-29-generic #29-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue May 5 19:42:34 UTC 2026 x86_64 GNU/Linux
❯ dmesg | more
[ 0.000000] Linux version 6.17.0-29-generic (buildd@lcy02-amd64-007) (x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc (Ubuntu 15.2.0-4ubuntu4) 15.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.45) #29-Ubunt
u SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Tue May 5 19:42:34 UTC 2026 (Ubuntu 6.17.0-29.29-generic 6.17.13)
[ 0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/vmlinuz-6.17.0-29-generic root=/dev/mapper/ubuntu–vg-ubuntu–lv ro quiet splash crashkernel=2G-4G:320M,4G-32G:512M,32G-64G:1024M,64G-
128G:2048M,128G-:4096M vt.handoff=7
[ 0.000000] KERNEL supported cpus:
[ 0.000000] Intel GenuineIntel
[ 0.000000] AMD AuthenticAMD
[ 0.000000] Hygon HygonGenuine
[ 0.000000] Centaur CentaurHauls
[ 0.000000] zhaoxin Shanghai
[ 0.000000] x86/split lock detection: #DB: warning on user-space bus_locks
[ 0.000000] BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
[ 0.000000] BIOS-e820: [mem 0x0000000000000000-0x000000000009efff] usable
…
```

6

One-paragraph “why it’s so flaky”

This laptop combines very new AMD display (Strix/DCN) + very new NVIDIA (Blackwell mobile) + PRIME + X11/Cinnamon page flips + per-kernel signed NVIDIA modules. A single driver removal, wrong kernel module package, runtime
GPU suspend, or bad DisplayPort training can drop the external monitor; a separate bug can freeze the desktop via AMD page-flip failures while the system stays healthy over SSH. Fixes are systematic (correct 590-open
stack per kernel, DPM off, prime nvidia, physical link reset) rather than one magic toggle.

After a kernel update or weird display behavior:

  1. uname -r — matches installed linux-modules-nvidia-590-open-*?
  2. prime-select query — expect nvidia for GPU-module external.
  3. cat /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-dynamic-pm-framework.conf — NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0 still there?
  4. nvidia-smi loads; Display Attached when external plugged in?
  5. grep . /sys/class/drm/card1-*/status — NVIDIA DP connected?
  6. If desktop frozen but SSH works: grep flip /var/log/Xorg.0.log → restart display-manager, not only Cinnamon.
  7. Avoid accidental PackageKit / GUI removal of nvidia-driver-590-open (check /var/log/apt/history.log).
  8. Prefer nvidia-driver-590-open + prebuilt modules — not mixing accidental nvidia-driver-590 (closed/DKMS) unless intentional.

If “it ain’t broke”: stay on a known-good kernel in GRUB and don’t chase every new 6.17.0-xx until linux-modules-nvidia-590-open- appears in apt.