Hi
I have a laptop with Ryzen 5900 HX and nvidia RTX 3070 GPU with kubuntu 22.04 (kernel 5.15) installed. The thing is I tried to switch the driver from 520 (it freezes quite often on when entering the desktop and sometimes freeze when doing normal activities like browsing) to 440 (lesser freeze But it still happened randomly). the current solution: hard-reset the computer, which is a notoriously bad solution. So, I have an idea by wipeout everything and downgrade to Kubuntu 20.04 which is older. But, I think it is much more stable. Do you think downgrading is good idea?
If you suspect stability issues due to newish hardware, downgrading is very rarely the way to go (unless the bug was introduced by a recent update).
Bugs get reported and fixed so you want to be doing the opposite, running a newer version of KDE and the kernel.
Have you enabled kde backports? If you’re going to wipe the computer anyway, maybe give Tumbleweed a shot? It’s running the latest everything while still being quite stable.
I already tried the backports and the freezing problem sometimes occurs. https://kubuntu.org/news/plasma-5-25-for-jammy-22-04-available-via-ppa/ and the reason I tried point release distros because the stability is much better. What do you think?
I think you’re going to have a lot better experience with plasma 5.27, they’ve done a lot of bug fixes since 5.25.
I’ve been running tumbleweed for a few years on a few different computers, I’ve only had an issue a few times, but it has a built in method to revert to a save point before the problematic update, so it’s super easy to undo and wait a few days to upgrade again. You can also look at slowroll, it’s tumbleweed on a slower release, though I’m not sure it’s out yet. I definitely recommend it over kubuntu though, I was originally using kubuntu but switched due to wifi driver issues.
If you want to stick to an Ubuntu based system, you could try neon, but it’s built on top of the Ubuntu stable releases so the packages are generally a lot older. It didn’t solve my wifi problems so I gave tumbleweed a shot.
@meiko60 why do you think that the reason for the freezes is the graphics driver? Isn’t Linux completely freezing typically a running out of RAM (when you haven’t set sufficient swap partitions or swap files). On KDE, you can enable the classical Ctrl+alt+del key to reset the xserver/Wayland (advanced keyboard options). Could you check whether this still works when the freeze occurs? Are there any special things in your system log?
I don’t think RAM is an issue and besides on the journalctl. I got this nvidia-modeset: ERROR: GPU:0:
What do you think?
@meiko60 newest Nvidia drivers are at the moment 535.xx. you could maybe try upgrading to se whether the situation changes. It’s easiest to get new Nvidia driver when following the instructions for installing CUDA. You typically don’t need to install all of the CUDA SDK and could for instance just install the package
cuda-driversI am a casual gamer and I heard this 535 have issue. I might try upgrade to latest 6.2 kernels and upgrade to 525 https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/08/recent-nvidia-drivers-are-causing-issues-for-proton/
Are you on Wayland, because if yes I strongly suggest to go with X11 for stability in cases like yours. If you really want to distro hop, you could try Debian stable, because it’s still very close to upstream & is much newer than Ubuntu 22 right now.
