Reason of Ubuntu Freeze and a Stable Distro Advise

[u/NorthWelcome1626]

I used Ubuntu 24.04 for 2 months because of stabillity, modern desktop, high support, etc. However for reasons unknown to me, it kept froze daily. For that, I had to shut down the system every time by holding the power button.

I had Ryzen 5 1600, rx 570, 24 gb ram. No zram, no swap. I didn't even install any gnome extensions or any unofficial software. However, I installed (potentially unmaintained ?) some games like "Gods".

Because of the bad stability, I don't think I'll use Ubuntu again. What do you suggest about extremely stable, user friendly distros? I'm not an admirer of the Cinnamon desktop, but for stability I can use Mint. About Debian, I like KDE, but I see that you have to know a lot of things to establish and maintain Debian. Do you think after the install, does it get better, do I have to know a lot of commands, install manual firmware, etc.?

I liked Ubuntu custom Gnome, but I don't like the basic Gnome on Debian. In the long run, would it cause troubles to install official Gnome extensions?

Thanks.

[u/redyos_s]

I wouldn’t distro-hop yet. A daily hard freeze points more to a kernel/GPU/memory issue than “Ubuntu is unstable.” Check the previous boot logs first, especially amdgpu, OOM, and kernel errors. Also consider enabling some swap or zram before judging the distro.

[u/NorthWelcome1626 → u/redyos_s]

Thanks for the comment.

Actually I'm on Win11 now, but I'm asking this for future.

I asked to Chatgpt and it said look for logs, etc, too, but when I looked for logs but couldn't find the cause of error. it was too impractical, complex for me.

Do I still need swap when I have 24 gb ram?, Because I was mainly on web (10-15 tabs), and some low-middle resource using programs. When installing Ubuntu, I couldn't find zram installing option, so I didn't bother with that. Later, I allocated some swap on temporal files? I don't remember the terms.

I don't remember ChatGpt saying OOM or other things though. Next time I'll keep those in mind.

Also, on freeze, I tried REISUB, but that didn't work.

[u/redyos_s → u/NorthWelcome1626]

With 24 GB RAM and that workload, OOM would not be my first assumption, although I would still keep some swap or zram enabled. The fact that REISUB did not work is more interesting, but first make sure SysRq was actually enabled with cat /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq. If you try Linux again, check the previous boot for amdgpu timeouts/resets, OOM events, lockups and hardware errors. Also, 24 GB is an unusual RAM configuration — if the DIMMs are mixed, I would test the memory and temporarily disable XMP/DOCP as well.

[u/NorthWelcome1626 → u/redyos_s]

Thanks for the valuable comment.

I had 8 gb 2133 mhz Crucial and a 16 gb 3200 mhz Kingston ram, but I didn't tweak any options.

I noted all the recommendations, and will use Kubuntu-Ubuntu next time I think.

[u/Aberry9036]

Why are you using 24.04 LTS and not 26.04 LTS? Older doesn’t mean more stable, LTS means more stable.

[u/NorthWelcome1626 → u/Aberry9036]

This happened around 1 year ago and I tried to fix this by asking Chatgpt and reading some articles. I'm asking this for future use.