Linux OS stuff Thread

I had a genuine hard freeze today. I had alot running. Was watching owcs on youtube fullscreen, and in the background I had blender, 3dcoat, vscode, and my usual 69 bajillion browser tabs.

Journalctl just shows a gap between 13:00 and 17:00 (I went to sleep hoping it would unfreeze).

This may be a first for me. I've had my desktop hang but I could always ssh in from another machine. This thing was fully dead. I couldn't even ping it.

Wierdly when I hit reset my bios settings got all reset and I had to redo the boot and such.

Kharzette said:

I had a genuine hard freeze today. I had alot running. Was watching owcs on youtube fullscreen, and in the background I had blender, 3dcoat, vscode, and my usual 69 bajillion browser tabs.

Journalctl just shows a gap between 13:00 and 17:00 (I went to sleep hoping it would unfreeze).

This may be a first for me. I've had my desktop hang but I could always ssh in from another machine. This thing was fully dead. I couldn't even ping it.

Wierdly when I hit reset my bios settings got all reset and I had to redo the boot and such.

Click to expand...

Sounds like a hardware failure. Nothing to do with the OS.

In my experience, Windows is more stable than Linux for desktop usage. Kernel and server-style apps are better in Linux, but GUI apps, gaming, and video card drivers tend to have more issues. It's gotten a better though, especially for GPU resets after a driver crash/hang.

Eh, I've had linux hosts running for literal years without issue. But yeah, in general if you are gaming/etc or are using the GUI consistently, you are going to generally have more issues than just running the same setup on Windows.

It has more to do with the variability of gaming/etc software vs. the OS itself. Linux is a workhorse, but it's a workhorse with blinders on. The moment you take those blinders off, you start finding that Linux distros tend to have very specific issues doing things they are not natively designed to do. Can they do them? Yes! But that isn't something you are going to do normally. Redhat/CentOS comes to mind immediately. It can do basically everything, but it isn't even remotely designed to do a lot of 'casual' user stuff. It's got goals and the design is goal oriented around those goals.

Linux is my work environment. Windows is what I do when I'm not trying to work. Linux... is work.

Kharzette said:

I had a genuine hard freeze today. I had alot running. Was watching owcs on youtube fullscreen, and in the background I had blender, 3dcoat, vscode, and my usual 69 bajillion browser tabs.

Journalctl just shows a gap between 13:00 and 17:00 (I went to sleep hoping it would unfreeze).

This may be a first for me. I've had my desktop hang but I could always ssh in from another machine. This thing was fully dead. I couldn't even ping it.

Wierdly when I hit reset my bios settings got all reset and I had to redo the boot and such.

Click to expand...

Check the boot drive, and look for kernel failures or boot drive failures in the /var/logs files. grep 'kernel' might give you a lot of information. If it just hard failed (ie, no logs between certain hours) then yeah you'll want to look at var/logs/messages and see what pops up. You'll see something like 'sda blah blah' right when shit starts falling over. (sda is typically the boot drive, but no idea what your partitioning system is; you may have stuff broken up more. If you do, then you already know more than I do about what errors to look for!)

Decided to ditch Windows and switched to Linux Mint 22 on my main desktop since I don't game on it anymore. Honestly, Mint is surprisingly snappy. I remember Linux desktops feeling very clunky years ago but this is just as responsive, probably more so, than Windows. I'm running the Cinnamon desktop environment.

I'm not a complete Linux n00b -- I know how to get around a command prompt just fine -- but AI (ChatGPT in particular) has been a huge help resolving minor issues or assisting with set ups.

PopOS! Is great if you’re looking for an OS to check out and get into Linux

My memory has gone to shit and I can’t remember the command line stuff anymore, so I haven’t really messed with Linux for real in years. But I remember my complaint was gaming headaches. Other than that, I really liked Mint for ease of use.

This was fun to follow along with, though you'll need the -no-stack-protector option when gccing as the comments say