cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34255100
Thought I’d create a distinct thread from the previous one asking about daily use, because I really do want to hear more on people’s pain points. Great to know people are generally sounding pretty positive in those posts who recently switched, but want to know your difficulties as well! This way old and new users can share their thoughts, hopefully to inspire a respectful discussion.
Not my pain point, but my friend’s.
He recently installed linux mint to try, mainly because of the dubious quality of windows 11. After using it normally for many hours (maybe for 2 ~ 3 days), his system just froze, the audio entered a loop, and he was only able to shut the computer down pulling it from the plug.
I have no idea why this happens, this used to happen to me as well on arch, but then it just stopped (maybe some package update fixed it?).
I’ve seem people pointing to proprietary nvidia drivers causing it, but I never understood how the driver could freeze everything in the computer.
A device driver needs access to the system to control a device. There’s a couple ways of going about it, but GPUs are effectively required to use a kernel driver. A kernel driver runs as part of your system, and crashes have different effects from normal programs. If a normal program crashes, the system handles that, the program closes, too bad. If the kernel crashes, nothing can catch that, and your whole computer crashes.
That being said, with this little info on the crash there’s nothing anyone can do except speculate on the cause. It could be hardware, it could be the kernel. Whatever it is, you’d need more information (
journalctl -b -1after a crash and reboot) to diagnose this issue.Though important to note; if holding the power button for an extended period of time (30s) doesn’t shut down the computer, it is most likely a hardware fault.
4 seconds should be enough.
A driver can absolutely freeze the entire computer.
That said it’s not really likely to be Nvidia since so many people are using that one without issues.
Linux people just like to hate on Nvidia and blame them for every possible issue because they’re not open source.
The only actual Nvidia problem iv seen in 5 years is that monster hunter wild is broken on their newer drivers only on 5000 series cards because of nvidia’s own choices.
Which is also broken on windows. So it’s just a Nvidia problem.