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
Somewhat obvious tips to get a more stable experience:
- Use a distribution that favour stability over being on the bleeding edge. Like Debian stable, or another distribution that maintain LTS releases,
- Install software from the distribution’s official package repositories. Avoid third party packages and repos as much as possible. If you really need a third party repo, verify it’s compatible with your specific distro and has reputation for being well maintained,
- When you do see a problem, take time to troubleshoot and if necessary make a bug report with necessary information for developers to identify the problem, so there’s a better chance to see it fixed.
- If you use Linux in a professional settings, there is paid support available out there, in some cases this get you priority for bug fixes.
Good advice, also Fedora’s “atomic” distros are both bleeding edge and extremely stable!
Atomic distro sounds like an interesting way to avoid breakage due to admin/user mistakes, so it’s a good suggestion. But it doesn’t help much with bugs in new software releases.
So the best choice depends on what exactly caused instability in OP’s case.
Like @wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 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 -eWhat 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?
Errors and Warnings obviousky.
you coukd redirect the output to a file
sudo journalctl -e > log.txtand upload it sonewhere for us to checkThank you! I’m going to do a proper memtest once I’m off work, and will take it from there.
It’s certainly weird that you have these issues on a Framework + an officially supported distribution.
Does it really run flawlessly on Windows 11? Because we have Framework 13’s at work, which run W11 and they DO NOT run flawlessly.
What about a fresh installation of Ubuntu? Do you have issues then? It could be some kind of configuration that you do, that screws with your system?
Does it really run flawlessly on Windows 11?
OMG, yes. Windows 11 has been running perfectly on both my Framework and an old (15 year old) desktop that doesn’t even officially support Windows 11! LOL
No crashes, no BSOD, no driver issues, no lockups. That’s why I’m so frustrated right now. I don’t want to use Windows, but I feel spoiled by the experience with it. :(
What about a fresh installation of Ubuntu? Do you have issues then? It could be some kind of configuration that you do, that screws with your system?
I installed Ubuntu several days ago (after several failed attempts to get Mint working). The problems started pretty quickly, but they are ongoing, and it’s getting annoying.
Someone else suggested another distro. I may need to see if that’s a better option.
Which issues do you have with Mint?
Off the top of my head, issues with installing. Like, it would say that installation is complete, I go to reboot, and it’s like it did nothing. No partitions were created, no boot changes. Then it would load without audio or issues with the fingerprint reader…
It is listed on the Framework site as being community supported, but Fedora and Ubuntu are officially supported by Framework.
It should at least install properly.
What kind of installation medium do you use? Have you tried a different USB? How do you make the bootable USB?
Could be an issue with Secure Boot in BIOS.
I had tried several, actually. But Ubuntu was installed through an external SSD.
To create the bootable drive, I’ve tried Rufus, Ventoy, and Etcher. I believe Etcher was the last one, and the one that got me to actually install Ubuntu.
Could be an issue with Secure Boot in BIOS.
Secure Boot and Bitlocker were turned off before I installed anything, as I know these could be issues. I haven’t turned either back on, but will once I get this to be stable.
It’s purely anecdotal but every time I’ve used an Ubuntu based distro it has been unstable or it nuked itself after 6 months to a year of use. I’ve been on fedora for 2-3 (4?) years now and I’ve not had a single issue apart from the Nvidia drivers behaving wonky sometimes.
Had the same feeling about Kubuntu. Absolute shit-show.
Went through Tuxedo OS (technically also Ubuntu based) and was very happy until Heroic and Steam blew themselves up when I installed a dGPU, then switched to Garuda (Arch based) and so far, so good.
Arch also can absolutely be installed just as quickly as any other distro if you use the archinstall script. I used it recently to install KDE plasma onto a Chromebook from 2017 and everything worked exactly as expected, I haven’t had any issues with stability so far. Can absolutely be done in under half an hour. It ofc doesn’t come with the advantage of understanding exactly how your system is set up, like you would if you did it yourself.
The last time I did that (slightly different setup with xfce) though I broke it somehow and ended up with if freezing often when booting, although I’m still not sure if that was a hardware problem or not, but it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. I also broke something with the audio jack somehow around then during an update, but chromebooks have weird audio drivers and you need to use this script maintained by (afaik) one person in their spare time. Anyways I would expect a framework laptop to handle it better as it’s newer and more common hardware.
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.
I’ve used Linux as my main and only workstation for over twenty years, and I’ve never had an experience close to what OP describe, so no, I wouldn’t say it’s always been that way.
It’s almost like bugs and such rarely affect everyone. I can say just about the same thing about any OS. YOUR experience isn’t necessarily someone else’s.
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.
But with Linux, I just can’t believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.
That doesn’t sound right.
Start with Linux Mint. I’ve helped Boomers use it. My dad has been using it as his daily driver for almost 5 years and he doesn’t know the difference between an OS and a Word Processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice “Linux”).
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.
Start with Linux Mint.
On this laptop, Mint was even worse, unfortunately!
I do have it running on a miniPC hooked up to my TV, though. Very basic stuff like video streaming. :(
It runs my TV too, which is a 7-year-old Dell All-in-One touch screen that works great.
Interesting, I’ve had terrible experience trying to get a stylus-supporting touchscreen to work on Mint.
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.
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.
Framework fully supports Ubuntu and has full guides on them. If you have issues, I’d suggest posting on the Framework message boards, they’re very responsive.
I don’t know the support model for Framework but they should really be able to work through these issues for such a common distro. With the various things you mentioned it doesn’t sound like bad configuration, it sounds like a hardware issue. Given that Windows is so different from Linux it may be the case that Win11 does a better job masking the issues.
Yes, I think I might need to, especially if advanced troubleshooting is needed.
I was hoping perhaps that it’s something I’m doing wrong. Clearly, this isn’t how it should be, but I’ll keep trying to get this working!
I think they have a live usb that you can boot into to see if the issues are still occurring there to try and rule out hardware. Would probably be my first go-to. If that works well, probably backup, wipe, follow the framework guide for your OS, and hopefully that does it. :)
Unrelated to OP—
This community is the fuckin sauce! Y’all really jump in to support each other and it’s really cool :)
I just set up a usb boot for mint yesterday and am prepping my pc to switch once I feel confident enough about Linux. I’m starting to gather that will be much sooner knowing the community is here to help out! I can’t wait to get all my services switched to FOSS alternatives.
Could this be a snaps thing?
I despise snaps and left Ubuntu for that reason. I don’t remember the specifics but I think even after installing firefox with apt it somehow get’s magically switched to a snap.
I daily drive debian on a t490s and it’s rock solid. There’s just no way anyone could consider this set up unstable.
In recent years I’ve found most of my problems come from the fancy new packages. In order of reliability I find that it goes apt > .dev > AppImage > flatpak > snap
If you’re using Ubuntu make sure you’re using the most recent LTS release instead of the latest one. Stability issues shouldn’t be a problem on those.
Where did you get this laptop from? Did you buy it new or used?
The reason why I ask is because it sounds like you have hardware issues.
Yep, the Firefox thing is weird. I’d run a memory test . Does this laptop do the same thing with Windows?
Also op mentions 20 years, were your other experiences like this?
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.
This was my experience as well … 20 years ago. I’ve not had many of these issues over the past few years using any distro. I used Debian for a couple years and now I’m on Arch. Really, it just works for me…
TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.
TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.
That seems to be the consensus from reading the other comments!
Yeah, I didn’t want to be not supportive of your choice of distros, but my immediate thought was not Ubuntu… I use it headless for some homelab servers, but nowadays as far as desktops go, Ubuntu is not it.
Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework, and it has been pretty set it and forget it. They’re all “atomic” desktops in that it’s hard to be able change the underlaying important parts of your computer, while you have free reign on all the bits that aren’t important to keep the lights on. Updates happen frequently, but don’t touch your files on top, so it’s always the latest, and if something does break, you can easily boot up into the last image you were on.
If you’re not looking to tweak your computer too much and just want it to run, I’d recommend Aurora or Bluefin depending on your desktop preferences.
Someone below mentioned Aurora, Bazzite’s sister. I currently use Bluefin, which is another of Bazzite’s sisters, also on Framework,
I know nothing about these… but I just installed Aurora in Boxes to try, and damn, it’s nice. Maybe a little “too busy”, but it’s got everything I could ask for out of the box (no need for extension manager). I might replace Mint with Aurora on my MiniPC, but if it’s as unbreakable as they say, it may replace Fedora.
Right now, Fedora has still be very stable, but since I’m staring from scratch, I might as well get it right the first time. I’ll be experimenting more to see which I prefer.
If it makes you feel any better it sort of is Fedora. Fedora has both original and atomic flavors. Someone took the atomic flavor of Fedora (which comes as a blank slate) and added in some quality of life changes. Nothing permanent, just tweaking some settings and preinstalling some programs. And then called it as Aurora.
And the only difference between Aurora and Bluefin is KDE (very customizable and Windows like) vs Gnome (customizable through widgets, but not enough if you’re a power tweaker and more of a Mac style desktop environments). And Bazzite is the same, but gamer focused (I installed it on my steamdeck).
