It started freezing maybe a month or two ago. It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later. I do not recall downloading anything around when this issue began that could be suspect.

I’ve put off fixing this because I have no idea how to even begin troubleshooting it. Internet searches for “Linux freezes” returns practically countless potential problems.

What are some recommendations? I have my root directory on a 30 GB partition separate from my home directory, which I think makes reinstalling my base image (Debian) easy without losing personal data, so that’s an option. Maybe there’s a system log file that would provide some insight?

I’m Linux dumb so please teach me how to fish!

I’ll add that my Windows install (on a separate drive) doesn’t freeze, and my Linux install is on a new Samsung drive that didn’t report issues, so the problems unlikely hardware related.

02:05 18OCT: Thanks for all the quick responses, a lot of helpful suggestions so far. I should clarify that “my computer freezes” means it is 100% unresponsive until it is rebooted. Ctrl+alt+del spam or changing terminal sessions when its frozen does not get a response. The last few entries in my most recent journalctl boot outputs are different from one another, and the I did not see any errors. For now, I’ll boot a live USB and let it sit for while, see if it crashes again.

  • unexpected@forum.guncadindex.comEnglish
    1·
    18 hours ago

    Is your swap big enough? Some installers default to only 1gig. That isn’t big enough normally.

    If it fills the ram and the swap, it will cause what you are seeing. Typically the suggestion is a little more than however much ram you have. Personally I set it at either 16 or 32gigs or more. Depending on the machine and what I intend on doing with it and how much drive space I have available.

    You can keep a system monitor open (or top, htop etc) and keep an eye on it when you’re doing something ram hungry, like having a bunch of browser tabs open or whatever. If it freezes and you look over and see the ram usage pegged to the top, that will suggest that that is your problem.