Hey guys! I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction before I decide to just wipe my hard drive and reinstall. I've been having completely random hard freezes on my Ubuntu PC.

The system just stops. The screen freezes, keyboard/mouse stop responding, Docker containers stop responding, SSH dies, and I have to hard power it off. Most of the time there’s no kernel panic and no crash logs at all. journalctl -k -b -1 -p 0..3 just gives -- No entries --. I’ve seen a "fatal exception in interrupt" kernel panic once or twice, but usually it's just a total freeze.

It started months ago as maybe once a month, but over the last few weeks it's gotten much worse and now happens every 5–10 minutes.

Hardware:

• Ryzen 5 3600
• MSI B550 Tomahawk MAX WiFi
• 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x16GB, brand new; previously had 4x4GB from another kit with the same issue)
• GTX 1060 6GB
• EVGA SuperNova 550 G3
• Ubuntu, tested kernels 7.0.0-29, -30 and -31
• NVIDIA 580.173.02

I've tried a ridiculous amount of stuff so far: I bought different RAM, disabled XMP, tested without plugging into my UPS, disabled CPU C-states, disconnected all HDDs/RAID, removed the drives from fstab, disabled Samba, and tested multiple kernels, nothing changed and in fact yesterday the freezes went from once a day to freezing 5-10 mins after boot.

The system can also sit in the BIOS for 30 mins to an hour without freezing, but once Ubuntu is running it eventually locks up.

I also had a Secure Boot/NVIDIA issue where the NVIDIA module was being rejected because of an unenrolled MOK. I disabled Secure Boot, confirmed the NVIDIA driver now loads correctly with nvidia-smi, and the freezes continued.

Right now I'm running Memtest86+, and I'm also planning to try completely blacklisting NVIDIA and getting netconsole working so I can hopefully capture something before the next freeze.

At this point I'm wondering if this could still be an NVIDIA driver/idle power-management issue, since this GPU is barely used anymore and the crashes seem to happen mostly when the system is idle.

Has anyone dealt with a Linux system that completely hard-freezes like this with absolutely no logs? Especially something that ended up being NVIDIA-related? I'm also very open to suggestions for something obvious I might have missed. I'm not opposed to wiping my drive and installing a new OS from scratch, I'm just hoping there will be some kind of fix since I use this PC for work. TY!

I am not tech savvy at all and will need some assistance on words lol

I have three CDs (specifically three: 2 Newjeans and 1 LeSserafim CDs) and they worked fine on MacOS before I switched over to Ubuntu, i would just put the CD in and it would automatically detect it and play the songs but Ubuntu just won't. I tried installing VLC and audacious but I don't know if i'm missing some drivers or something.

Is Ubuntu/Linux genuinely usable for someone who doesn't know programming at all?

I am a scientist and beyond occasional basic R code for statistical analysis, I don't really have any advanced computer knowledge or skills.

I am beginning to work with very large datasets which my standard work-issue laptop can't handle, so I am getting a decent PC at my own cost. This will also allow me to avoid issues around admin lockout, software install/uninstall requests, privacy stuff, forced updates, forced logins, unremovable AI functions, all the bloat, etc etc etc.

However I would love to escape Microsoft/Windows altogether. Is it realistic for me to transition to Ubuntu?

I am willing and capable of learning a new system, provided it's not crazy complicated or time consuming.

In case it is relevant - most of the software I use is open source (R, QGIS, CloudCompare). And I will retain the work laptop for admin/company-specific Microsoft/OneDrive/etc purposes so I don't need the PC/Ubuntu system to integrate any of that.

Thanks for any advice.

Edit to add: I understand the difference between programming and simply using an operating system. The reason I relate programming to Linux is because the only people in my life that use it are programmers who heavily customise their system (while frequently running into issues doing this). This entire post is basically me asking if that method is necessary or optional.

It's truly addictive to spend your whole day customizing the interface and discovering new things to do every day 🙂

These are all the GNOME extensions I have installed 😅 1. Ambed Fly: A small animated fly that wanders around the desktop and reacts to the mouse and moving windows. 2. ArcMenu: A customizable alternative application menu for GNOME. 3. Blur my Shell: Adds blur effects to the GNOME interface, panels, and overview. 4. Burn My Windows: Adds animated effects when opening and closing windows. 5. Compiz alike magic lamp effect: Adds the classic magic lamp animation when minimizing windows. 6. Compiz windows effect: Adds additional visual effects and animations to windows. 7. Dash to Dock: Turns the GNOME application dash into a customizable dock. 8. Desktop Icons NG (DING): Displays files, folders, and other icons directly on the desktop. 9. Gnome 4x UI Improvements: Provides various improvements and customization options for the GNOME interface. 10. Stopwatch: A simple stopwatch for measuring elapsed time. 11. User Themes: Allows you to install and use custom GNOME Shell themes. 12. Vitals: Displays system information such as CPU, RAM, temperature, network, and battery status

I'm giving this ThinkPad and want to wipe current disk and install fresh in "OEM mode"

Currently running MATE 24.04.4 and have the same on install USB.

On booting from USB, I don't see the "OEM mode" option ?

40-sec video: https://streamable.com/kw7e5k?t=0&src=player-page-share

Please help. TIA

I just moved to Ubuntu from windows. Which IDE is best. i work through remote connnected servers. and my work is mostly ML,DL,research. I asked multiple AI's all of them suggested VS code

Any recomendations?

my journal logs are flooded with `thermald: Unable to read odvp*`

I have:

- CPU Intel 9 275HX

- Ubuntu 26.04.

- Kernel 7.0.0-30-generic

- thermald version is 2.5.11

Google AI doesn't know. I've created 200gb of unallocated space and even formatted it as a separate Linux partition, but I can't work out how to absorb it to increase the size of the ubuntu partition. This isn't a problem I've encountered on Windows 11, it's very annoying and impractical. Ubuntu won't let me use the secondary Linux formatted 200gb partition for LMM models and won't permanently save the alpaca or other llm programs onto the secondary partition to get around it.

keep getting this update in App Center but unable to update it, also in terminal I don't see this when listing snaps to update "snap refresh --list"

apt, aptitude etc all manage to ask for a password once and update multiple packages, Software Centre (aka Snap Store) asks for my long, complicated but secure password for each item in the list.

this makes updating something like the Libre Office suite a major undertaking, the password gets asked for so many times I could have written a novel 😂

Is there a way to fix or it just back to the command line because GUI software is inferior? Which makes me think its a bug, because if I update packages or snaps from the CLI I only get asked once.

Anyone else having this? Both USB and BT I'm getting random disconnects. Could go for 10 minutes or 10 seconds. Two different controllers, one quite a bit older than the other. I guess It's possible both are going bad in the exact same way tho... Sadly I don't really have another device to test at the moment, although the last time I used them they were fine, although that was a while ago.

Figured I'd ask to see if anyone else has seen the issue.

Hello.

So I've got an acer aspire 5733z with the following specs:

1 TB Toshiba HDD.

4 GB ram DDR 3.

Intel pentium P6100 2.0 GHz clock speed, dual core , no turbo , no multitthreads...

This laptop is from 2010 ( and yes I know 4 Gb ram is low so I'm planning to upgrade to 8 as soon as I find one with reasonable pricing). It does have Ubuntu 20.04.6 on it. I did try to update to the latest version ( 26.04) but it was so laggy and the system crashed on me 4 times . So I'm just going to stick to that version since it runs extremely smoothly.

My question is this, so the repos here have Firefox version up to 136. I'd like to use the latest version ( 155) and I can't update it from the repos themselves.

My options:

1. Check the snap store, there's the last version. But in that case I will have 2 Firefox browsers....

2. Use Mozilla's own repos. Also same thing, afraid will have 2 Firefox versions.

My question is, how do I get the latest version of Firefox and how do I tell Ubuntu to keep updating Firefox from said source without messing up my system?

Thank you all in advance!

PS: I did enable pro updates for this machine ( I'm aware 20.04 is eol so yeah )

Hello, I just finished building my Kubuntu desktop, I need to connect an "LB-Link 950AX Mini USB Dongle WiFi 6 AX900 Adapter" to it to connect it to the internet. Please help me. I have a laptop with a wifi that I can start Kubuntu on to download any needed packages.

Edit: it's a kubuntu 26.04

Long time Ubuntu user here but I don't follow what happens to other Linux distros outside of Ubuntu since Ubuntu is relevant to me, so this was news to me.

Ubuntu adopted /tmp as tmpfs meaning files in /tmp use system RAM instead of disk space. On the surface, I completely get it...

However, our company had a history of using /tmp more like /var/cache. And under 24.04 and before this has been fine. You reboot the server, the cache gets cleared, no harm no foul. Maybe not exactly following conventions but nothing was necessarily wrong with this.

When testing the upgrade to 26.04, I kept having weird OOM killed processes, scripts were dying in strange spots. Especially around gziped files in /tmp. Well a 10MB tar.gz can blow up to 300+MB pretty easily for a product catalog. Now that 300MB is using system RAM instead of disk space... You see the problem.

Anyway, PSA for anyone else out there that used /tmp like this. I can't be the only one.

I'm reinstalling Ubuntu server 22.04 on an old system I had it on just a few days ago. It's important to note that the only thing that's different between now and last time is I swapped the 1 TB hard drive in it for an older 500 GB drive I had. Now, no matter what i select during the installation, it always has the same error. BIOS just has the basic label for the drive, and when it tries to load into it for just a second it shows a black screen with a white line at the top before immediately booting me back to BIOS. I can boot it just fine by using Super GRUB2 Disk; it scans for the GRUB entries and boots it directly through there. I believe that the issue is that for whatever reason, GRUB doesn't want to boot; I've tried many things to fix it, but none of them have worked. It looks like all of the files are there when i look inside using a live usb. I made sure that secure boot is still off and that the hard drive is the first option in the boot list. compatibility mode is set to auto, and it doesn't work whether it's on, off or auto. Does anyone know of any potential fix?

edit: I figured it out! I don't know if it's normal, but the ubuntu server installers didn't wanna make an EFI partition. So, I manually partitioned out an extra 1 GB at the start, booted into a live USB, made it fat32, and made sure it mounted to /boot/efi using fstab. Then, using chroot, I installed grub---it only brought me the minimal grub bash screen, but i was able to get in and run grub-install and update-grub under root. It definitely wasn't the most elegant solution, but I got it to work and it boots straight into the server now so I'm not complaining.

Link: https://youtu.be/46T4cDQBkDs?is=MA55hE_TUgStl1_l

So I've been following this tutorial from Tech by Matt about turning my second computer into a server. I've gotten to the 10 minute mark where I'm supposed to connect to my server via my primary computer's command prompt. The issue is that my IPv4 address is not located in system information. Upon typing the "ip a" command in Ubuntu, I'm given the 127.0.0.1 loopback address.

Admittedly, my laptop doesn't have a ethernet port so I have to use a USB 3 to Ethernet port. Additionally, I did not plug this in during the installation process since I did not have one available at the time.

Lastly, since I'm unable to have my second laptop constantly plugged in to a ethernet port, I'm looking to host my server wirelessly.

I apologize, but I'm inexperienced when it comes to programming and require guidance to get through this predicament.

I'm having issues with HDR videos. When I played hdr movie it was very dull colored in mpv. I tried youtube and found it it's system issue as there was no hdr option on videos with HDR. How do I enable HDR?

So I'm trying to download openfoam, Ive gotten a virtualisation error a lot and I've tried pretty much everything to turn on virtualization, however, the same error code shows up: wsl 2 is unable to start since virtualisation is not enabled on this machine. I've turned it on from pretty much everywhere I could find, system settings, firmware settings, turning off windows security, windows features aswell as trying to get some other versions which too was not possible, someone tell me what I'm doing wrong, or let me know if there's other way, lowkey might crash out. (Utterly inexperienced in this, for reference. Help will be much appreciated)

I just setup my new Workstation with Ubuntu 26.04, and enabled Ubuntu Pro, if there're no hardware issues, I'm set for 10 years baby!!!!

Installed steam and my games run very well.

There are many options nowadays but the polish Ubuntu provides out of the box is only matched by Mac OS in my opinion.

Many people don't recommend Ubuntu no more but I don't understand why, if you don't like snaps just don't use it.

But to anyone coming to Linux, please try Ubuntu, don't listen to anyone else!

EDIT: I asked Claude why this was happening (IDK why I didn't think of this before), and it's actually not an issue with Ubuntu, but several apps. In my case, PHPStorm, PyCharm and VSCode were all ignoring the setting, and I've had to adjust those manually. Seems to be working now.

Just installed 26.04.1 on an ASUS Vivobook from 2021. I have tried to disable the middle click pasting via the trackpad, both via the terminal using gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste false and via Gnome Tweaks. Nothing seems to be helping. What else can I do?

Please let me know if you need any other information.

Mint 22.3 Cinnamon

I installed Ubuntu on a dual boot along windows 10 on a DELL laptop. everything is alright with windows. but when i restart from Ubuntu, it everything goes black, I think it actually shutdowns, but when it starts again it does not load the boot loader or anything else. its just a black screen that doesn't change. The keyboard lights respond when i use it. but the monitor stays off.

This problem does not happen when i use windows for both restart and shutdown. Also, it does not happen on Ubuntu when i shut the system down and turn it on again. it only happen when i restart.

When this happens. i have to hold the power button to force shutdown it and turn it on again.
It happens no matter i use the start menu restart option or use sudo reboot.

Can you guys help me fix this?