Hi, I recently switched from Manjaro to Garuda because of a few problems, one of these being random UI freezes. I was thinking it is manjaro but apparently it happens on a fresh install of Garuda too. Using the normal, zen and amd kernels had the same problem. Live booting on xfce and gnome seems to work fine without the freezes. I searched on the internet and there seems to be no fixes. Does anyone have an idea of how to do this?
An initial consideration would be a hardware issue of some kind, as that would be a resource in common between the two operating systems.
This could be a clue as well--not the desktop environment part, rather the fact that your system is fine in the live environment. My suspicion is drawn to your hard drive, as this is not used or even mounted in the live environment.
A quick Whoogle search of your hard drive turns up quite a few hits for folks experiencing a similar issue.
Ultimately, a disk issue is something that should be resolved by Samsung through a firmware update to the disk, but until that happens the last link above has a few ideas to try that seemed to resolve the issue for the person who opened the thread.
From what I've read nvme SSD's can have issues when lower power mode is enabled.
This is my main desktop so I don't care about going into lower power mode.
Under Advanced Power Options
Set to High Performance.
Change Plan Settings
Put computer to sleep Never
Turn Off DIsplay 30 Mins.
Advanced Power settings
Turn off Hard Disk after 60 Minutes
Sleep After Never
Hibernate After Never
USB Settings
USB selective Suspend Setting
Disabled
PCI Express
Link State Power Management
OFF
I think the Link State Power Management might be the most important since we are on PCI Express BUS 4.0 X 4
I hope that helps, welcome to the community @ChillSheep.
Thanks! The SSD wasn't used for more than a few months and SMART indicates that it's ok, that is why I thought KDE was the problem since I didn't use my pc for ~2months and only after updating everything it started to have problems, the thing is that after updating I directly switched from an nvidia card to this amd one.
Samsung magician doesn't recognize my ssd on Linux so I'll boot into the 256gb ssd I have where I have windows installed and try from there.
Also I can't seem to find those type of power settings in the "System Settings" app from kde. I only found the basic screen ones.
I'll boot into windows, update the firmware if possible and come back with an update if it works fine now. Thanks a lot for the help!
Edit, installed samsung magician, had to run with --no-sandbox because of a bug with electron and windows apparently. Will update with more info
I did not read the notes closely, but now that I do I think they are referring to setting that must be available inside Windows.
I would comb through the BIOS settings at least, to make sure any available disk-related power saving options are disabled. This person in the same thread had another BIOS-related piece of advice:
Go to BIOS
Under Boot select CSM to use both UEFI & Legacy. leave the rest options as UEFI only.
Honestly, on its face it seems like strange advice to me, and I don't see how this setting would be helpful for the indicated issue. On the other hand, it doesn't seem like it could hurt; you could give it a shot, and just change it back if no improvement is observed.
this broke grub, I'll come back with news after I try to fix grub from live boot of garuda, it will take some time because my ventoy usb was used to update the bios
I have a 980 PRO as well.
I also suffered random UI freezes a few weeks after I got my new CPU in 2019. It started to get worse in Summer 2022 and after MANY tests I had to conclude for HW stability issues. I bought a new CPU and ALL of my issues got IMMEDIATELY fixed. But I had to pay and buy new HW in order to test that!
It is sometimes a tedious process but I highly recommend you find ways to test various things in order to eliminate the possibilities one by one. Random freezes with 2 different distros can often point to HW. Could be a simple setting or a real HW failure.
Oh! That reminded me to check the CPU in the inxi. Its a first gen AMD Ryzen CPU, which have some nasty C-state issues. If this "UI freeze" can't be rebooted from using REISUB, I am thinking this is the issue with the Ryzen 1700X and the c-states. There MIGHT be a way to fix this if the motherboard @ChillSheep has options for c-states.
If not, I highly suggest looking into a more recent Ryzen processor as even running the LTS kernel can only help so much (and a few months back even LTS didn't help my Ryzen 1700 anymore and I had to upgrade the CPU in order to fix the issue).
I'll try this fix, since it all happened after a system upgrade after ~2 months, so the kernel was upgraded as well, the live boots had an older kernel
Also is there any tutorial for downgrading the kernel? In Manjaro kde typing kernel opened a helper that let you manage them, but it doesn't seem to show in my install of Garuda
Sorry for the spam of replies
New problem, now I had the whole "session" crash.
The screen went black, after some seconds the lock screen appeared, after entering my password, everything was like a fresh boot. I use luks and wasn't asked for my pw so the pc didn't restart.
Soo.... most things pot to a HW issue? If yes, is it definitely the CPU? It all started to happen after I switched my GPU too from a 1060 to a rx 6700xt. The 6700xt I got isn't new, but it has warranty and I don't think it is the problem since the guy I got it from tested it
Oh god there is absolutely no guarantee to that. IF, if HW is the culprit, it could be pretty much anything... bad mem sticks, incompatible mem sticks with other HW, failing MB, failing CPU, failing GPU, failing HD, could even be failing power supply (I had one of these!). This is why the HW troubleshooting requires a lot of creativity to test various scenarios and isolate the component. On top of that, you sometimes don't even see any errors in journalctl. Not always easy to track!
Are you able to switch it back? That's a good HW test! Actually, that would be awesome if you could swap back, it would be easier to focus on something (software driver or GPU itself).
That doesn't mean anything, unfortunately. There are so many variables at stake, like what HW that guy was using and even if it's the exact same as yours, what if his was top shape but yours has one failing component...
It's hell when HW is involved. If you can swap for other HW that's a great way to isolate. If you can try more distros as well, like Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Fedora, etc... If you experience the same issue in all of them, you start to see a pattern.
But if in any way you can try another GPU, this would provide great data to troubleshoot deeper.
Aah I'll try to switch back, also the PSU is 650W and it's the minimum recommended so it sucks it can be anything, i hope i'll have the time (i wont be home for a few m again)
Apparently with my old gpu it seems to work fine? Still had it stutter one time but not on that level... Can it be the PSU? It is rated for 650w and the minimum recommended wattage for the gpu is 650 too... Can it be a problem that the gpu is "daisy chained"? The same cables were used for both the 8 pins there (6+2 and another 6+2).
Your old GPU is using PCIe 3.0 and your new 6700 can use 4.0.
Can you test rollbacking to 3.0 in your BIOS, for all PCIe slots? (including 980 Pro)
I had issues when I got my 980, I enabled 4.0 although my NVIDIA was 3.0, for my MB it's not possible to segregate slot generations (even after web reading I had no indication of this back then!), so I ended up with issues until I disabled 4.0 and rolled back to 3.0. Then I swapped to a 4.0 PCIe AMD, enabled again 4.0 and all good.
Normally roll backing to 3.0 is easy and should not suffer any data loss by doing so.
This is well worth testing, with your new AMD of course.
Thanks! I have a MSI B350M Mortar which doesn't have support for PCIe 4.0.
Tomorrow morning I'll test with different DE as well to see if it's a KDE specific issue too.
It seems there is something with my setup with an AMD card (or at least navi 2) and KDE. I tried installing Manjaro GNOME and it seems to work perfectly fine with the AMD gpu in, with MESA drivers installed. This is very weird but it might be a bug in KDE? Or a bug in KDE with my specific setup?
The good news is you are on the right track! It seems to be something around the GPU.
Maybe some better skilled persons can hop in and point out what to check/test from here. My suggestions would only be far fetched in this scenario.
In the meantime if you google for your card running KDE you will certainly find something if there is a bug there.
BTW your understanding of the issue and acceptance to try various things in order to isolate the issue is very well appreciated! In Linux this is a great mind to have. Don't give up.
Oh! That reminded me to check the CPU in the inxi. Its a first gen AMD Ryzen CPU, which have some nasty C-state issues. If this "UI freeze" can't be rebooted from using REISUB, I am thinking this is the issue with the Ryzen 1700X and the c-states. There MIGHT be a way to fix this if the motherboard