Random freezes due to nvidia drivers?

MarkvV

So, I really like Solus. I've tried many other distro's like Manjaro and Pop_OS!. However they all seem to suffer from the same random freezes. Some distro's more frequent than others. They're appearing the least on Solus as far as I can tell right now. However when it happens it's really annoying. Nothing works other than holding my power button for 5 seconds. I have looked all over internet for a possible solution but I haven't found any. Since I really want to stick with Solus I'm reaching out to you guys.

I suspect the nvidia drivers for causing this issue. I don't really need them other than for my HDMI output to work on my laptop. Else I could do without. Is there any way to diagnose this problem or is this a known issue (with a known solution)?

I'd love hearing from you.

edit: maybe an interesting fact is that when it freezes the last few seconds of the playing sound is looped indefinitely.

zmaint

Using Solus Plasma with Nvidia RTX2060. Been on it as my daily driver since the offical ISO released.

The only lockup/freezes I have experienced are:
Brave Browser - when streaming Youtube only.. Sometimes it just hard locks and that's it. I am 99.9% sure it's Brave's fault. They'll update, then it will be fine for a month, then after another update it will do it again...

Feral's gamemode. Sometimes when using gamemode, the game will hard lock the system. I'll remove gamemode from the Steam command and the game will run for hours. Re-enable, hard lock. Again 99.9% sure this is an issue with gamemode.

I've been using sysrq (REISUB) to reboot safely when it happens, although I'm still looking for the correct Solus way to implement this permanently.

[deleted]

zmaint I am 99.9% sure it's Brave's fault

use Firefox.
🔥 🦊

edit: solus, by default never comes with brave preinstalled, so you are having issues with brave after an explicit install. 🤔

MarkvV

zmaint I'm on GNOME. Should I try Plasma and see if the problem still exists?

I am using Firefox as that's the default in Solus Gnome.

zmaint

[deleted]
I remove Firefox these days. I refuse to support them after their open support for censorship. Censorship is bad for everyone.

I also need two browsers. I use Brave for personal use (+ I get crypto) and Vivaldi for work. Helps keep my business bookmarks separate, and also I can't have two different instances of Zoho workspace open in the same browser.

zmaint

MarkvV Probably not. I had issues with FPS problems on Pop, due to gnome stack trouble, but never random freezing (was not on Pop for long.. since I found Solus... and I didn't use Brave there). Solus however is a different critter. The team does a very good job curating packages (absolutely rock solid distro IMO, I don't even recommend other distros) so I doubt this is the cause.

Since you've tried multiple distros (when means multiple kernels and multiple Nvidia drivers) more than likely your card has issues, or possibly your PSU, cabling.. or maybe airflow causing some temp lockups. Probably not what you want to hear with the current GPU market, but it sounds a lot like hardware.

WetGeek

MarkvV I'm on GNOME. Should I try Plasma and see if the problem still exists?

It couldn't hurt. When KDE/Plasma was first offered by Solus, I wasn't much impressed. But after a few updates by the team, I could no longer tell the difference (in performance) from my beloved Budgie desktop.

Now I use Plasma on the majority of our computers here. If you're able to create a VM and try Plasma there before you install it on your hardware, that would be ideal, but you might just become a Plasma fan even if it doesn't fix that problem for you.

MarkvV

zmaint to be sure I should reinstall Windows and have it running for some time. I actually think it wouldn't freeze there. Anyway, there's nothing else I can do to diagnose the issue?

I will try to switch to Solus Bungie or Plasma. And see what will happen. A final question: there is also no way to have my HDMI output working without Nvidia drivers? It's the only way to connect a external monitor on my laptop.

zmaint

WetGeek I think it's the best KDE distro available 🙂

zmaint

MarkvV If you don't install the Nvidia proprietary driver using DoFlicky, the default opensource Nouveau drivers will be used instead. You should still be able to use HDMI out (* I think*). The Nouveau drivers are.... ok... for general use like spreadsheets and web browsing.

Might also try a stress test for the GPU. I believe GpuTest is cross platform standalone python, Phoronix is in our repo, and I think Unigine is a cross platform standalone as well.