My laptop seems very finicky with linux and enjoys periodically freezing. Some distributions are more stable than others and I’d like to keep testing other distributions without reinstalling/ downloading/transferring all my apps and steam games constantly.
What I would like to achieve is to have my small handful of flatpak apps and flatpak steam games on a separate partition to quickly access while I test and troubleshoot issues.
Is that possible to do with flatpaks?
If your laptop periodically freezes, switching distros won’t fix it.
Identifying the underlying issue (which is most likely a hardware defect) would be a better use of your time.
Your first step would be to try and reproduce the issue. See under what circumstances it happens. See if it happens from a live USB or only from your installed system (If it does, this eliminates the SSD as most probable culprit). Do a RAM test. Then ask for help with further trouble-shooting.I’ve spoken to another user who has the same issue as me and they made a couple suggestions including disabling certain options in BIOS or trying a distribution with a newer kernel.
At first I thought it was issues with iGPU and dGPU switching but I’m beginning to suspect that’s not the case.
Reproducing when it freezes is a challenge because it’s very inconsistent and does not leave and crash reports.
The only improvement I’ve seen yet is switching from Linux Mint 21.2 to LMDE 6 but the kernel is still older compared to the versions that I was suggested for my hardware.
I would like to try a newer kernel just for the sake of trying.
I feel you. The bugs that get the machine to crash and you have zero chance of getting any useful debug information, are by far the most annoying ones.
In my experience it’s most of the time some driver issues in the kernel or the (NVidia) proprietary drivers. Or an hardware issue. On Debian I can install several kernel versions alongside each other. So there would be no need for me to install more than one distribution. Most of the times a proper crash isn’t caused by the userspace anyways, so it boils down to the different kernel versions and configurations anyways. You could also try an older kernel.
To this day I have no idea how to even get journalctl errors from exactly before that crash.
Like all this
journalctl -r -b 1and all that doesnt seem to show the right ones.On my debian machine something like
journalctl -b 1 -kshows stuff. There’s also lots of debug files in /var/log/ like boot.log debug, kern.log, messages, syslog.But it somehow needs to be able to store the log on your disk. If the system craps out completely, it won’t get written to disk. The magic SysRequest keys might help if it only freezes. I learned “Raising elephants is so utterly boring.” You might wanna goggle that and learn how to do it.
Other than that, I mostly look at all logs (no ‘-b1’ and search for the place where it rebooted. Sometimes you find other related stuff while scrolling. But my own (old) thinkpad doesn’t ever crash.
I think there are other crash-dump tools available. It believe there’s something called ‘kdump-tools’ available on Debian. YMMV.
I have an AMD + AMD setup but apparently the Dell G5 series has issues with linux so it’s been an uphill challenge.
I did see that LMDE 6 makes it easy to boot different kernels at startup which is handy. I tried looking at Liquorix Kernel but I don’t think it’s ready for LMDE 6 just yet. I can’t recall exactly why but I got a big nope when trying to download it. I think I tried looking at the Zen Kernel as well but couldn’t figure out if it’s just for Arch or if it’s compatible with Debian.
Too much to learn and now enough hours or attention span. Slow progress but I guess it’s a thing to do besides watching my plants grow.
Maybe just start with the different versions available in your distro’s package manager. I’ve never downloaded a custom kernel from somewhere else. (Well, I have but that was embedded stuff and not a desktop computer.)
pages like this also suggest things like updating the BIOS and the graphics card firmware with some AMD tool. And I’ve read several times you should try the kernel parameter
amdgpu.runpm=0Make sure to do all of that first. And observe if the freezes happen in certain circumstances. Maybe you can deduct something from that. Maybe it happens while gaming (GPU). Or when under load. Or if you move it around (loose connection), or when hot or after a certain time even if idle. Disable power management and see if that helps. Should be less effort than installing 5 operating systems. (If the crash isn’t super rare) And try using the magic SysReq keys to force linux to sync and reboot to see if the kernel is still alive somehow.
Fortunately I updated my BIOS from windows before switching to Linux and as of recently, I still have the latest version.
I added
amdgpu.runpm=0and that did increase stability considerably. My system froze up way less often which was great.I also found that adding
processor.max_cstate=1has made my system even more stable and I haven’t had a freeze up in days now. This page gives a nice run down of what it does.I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a freeze up in the future but overall my system has been a lot more stable making everything far more enjoyable.
Awesome. Let’s hope the eventually fix the remaining hiccups. Maybe it’s really the power management if those kernel parameters did it.
Have a separate home partition and just keep using it across distributions?
Additionally, ensure that flatpaks are installed within that home partition. Some distros (like Fedora) default to installing flatpaks system-wide (and thus flatpaks end up being installed in
/varinstead). So, after ensuring that your home folder is correctly found within the home partition, just install flatpaks with theflatpak install --user *package-name*command.I’m not experienced enough with linux to understand if this is a question or a statement on what I can do. In either case, I don’t know how to interpret what this means.
They are confirming that, yes, it is an option to have a partition dedicated to just the user’s (your) home environment and folders
and
asking if that is an option that appeals to you or you have already considered.
It is what I prefer, but there are people who have good reason to not like that. It’s worth trying out imo, and later if you find that it doesn’t suit you, that’s okay, you’ll just need to find another solution
Thank you, that makes sense.
What reasons would people not like doing that?
I personally feel like separation of user data and OS data is easier for me to manage.
I find it annoying to worry about multiple partition sizes. Having to make sure your root and home partition are sized correctly is one more thing to think about.
That makes sense. I guess for my case it’s fine since I have more storage than I can use. Additionally, I keep my most important data on multiple offline storages and even that is quite minimal.
When installing Linux, you first have to partition your hard drive.
You can create a seperate partition for your /home folder in addition to the one you create for the rest of the system.
Then when you install a different distro, you can tell the installer to use your /home partition without changing or formatting it. After installation, you will have the new Linux system and the /home folder from your old one. That way, all user settings and flatpak settings will be the same as before reinstalling.But if you’re a new Linux user, I don’t know how helpful this is. It’s easier to just copy everything in /home to an external drive, then copy it back after you reinstalled, for the same effect.
That first bit makes sense, I should be able to figure that out I think.
The reason I want to avoid using an external drive is because it takes a minimum an hour to transfer 4 games worth of data currently. That time is an inhibiting factor for me. I’d like to minimize downtime.
Also I’d like to test gaming oriented distributions with newer kernels compared to what Linux Mint ships with.
I have my steam library on a second drive but I am not using the flatpak of steam.
I think it’s possible to have the steam flatpak use a second partition, if you use flatseal to allow the steam flatpak full access.
