I’m using an XPS 13 9350 with 16GB of RAM and the Intel Graphics 540. I am using Fedora KDE spin. When I am using computer, either randomly or when I start a program, my computer will slow down and quickly fully freeze. In this state, the only thing I can do is shut it down. Is there any way to make it so that a program is killed, or something else that doesn’t fully stop my system?
Once fully frozen, it’s not really able to be saved.
Is it a full freeze? Press CAPS-LOCK or NUM-LOCK to see if the hardware is still responding.
If it is, it might just be a DE freeze. Try to SSH into into your frozen device, from another PC or phone.
Or press CTRL-ALT-F7 to see if you can switch to a terminal and login.
Once in, use ps -ef, or top to see and kill what might be causing a freeze.
Turn on auto-save in LibreOffice(you usually only lose a sentence or 3 words with this on).
Investigate IDEs with auto-backup or an autosaved change-history.
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To diagnose whether you have bad RAM, boot from a LiveUSB distro and use it for a day or week.
If no freezes, reinstall a fresh OS.
If it still freezes, get new RAM, or replace whole PC/laptop.
As a side note I also use a xps 13 don’t remember the model but I have found they do not properly implement the sleep function and can cause issues when coming out of sleep. I have seen the computer act fine till I open something and then crash.
I’ve had this on previous laptops, and gave up on using Sleep mode, just used full shutdown every time.
I super appreciate the comment, as I’ve had the same issue and didn’t know how to deal with it without a full reboot. If there an equivalent command in Linux for what control Alt delete does in Windows?
Can confirm, the SSH thing saved me many times. I’m running Arch (btw), so as it turned out it did not have a working sshd by default, nor any swap enabled. I very quickly ran into issues where not even oom killer could save it. Once I figured these out though it was smooth sailing.
Lesson of the story: Don’t try to compile firefox from source without swap…
