I’m a Linux noob. I started using Fedora a couple of weeks ago on my laptop (HP Probook 445 with a ryzen 5 & 8GB RAM). Overall I love it, but there’s a growing number of programs that make it crash. It goes to a black screen that appears to be a blank command line then reloads to the login/lock screen. My programs all close when this happens, like with a full restart.
The first program that did this was Vivaldi, which would work for a little while then crash the whole computer as described, so I switched back to Firefox. I’ve had a couple of slightly more random crashes, but for the most part it was stable…Until I started fiddling with some settings on my Steam games.
Steam kept downloading ‘updates’ every time I opened it (making it impossible for me to play my games!), so after a bit of googling I turned off Steam’s shader pre-caching thing. And now almost every time I try to open a game, it crashes my whole system.
Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed (a nice looking but relatively old/unintensive 3D game) still sometimes works (there’s possibly a higher chance of success if I close other open programs, and it seems more likely to crash if I’m in low power mode).
Bot Vice (a pixel art indie game) seems to run fine even in low power mode.
Melody’s escape (unintensive 2D indie game) initially opened fine in windowed mode at a low resolution, but crashed after I set it to use 1080p full screen (my laptop isn’t a gaming machine, but it should hardly bat an eyelid at running something this light).
The Crash Bandicoot remake (another 3D game, more recent and probably more demanding than Sonic racing) sometimes reaches the first loading/logo screen but then instantly crashes.
The above mentioned 3D games were running fine before I turned off the shaders cache, but I hadn’t tried the 2D games on it yet.
The issues with Vivaldi started on Fedora 40, but I’m now upgraded to 41. I use the default gnome desktop.
Put the machine under some stress with a memory test (which will also let you know your ram is all good and fully seated even when it gets hot) and the same thing for your CPU.
This test works by stressing system interfaces. It is good at catching memory signal integrity or setup and hold problems, memory controller and bus interface issues, and disk controller issues. It is moderately good at catching bad memory cells and cache coherency issues. It is not good at catching bad processors, bad physical media on disks, or problems that require periods of inactivity to manifest themselves. It is not a thorough test of OS internals. The test may cause marginal systems to become bricks if disk or memory errors cause hard drive corruption, or if the physical components overheat.
You should run a dedicated memory test for an extended period – say overnight a couple times.
For some reason it took more fiddling around to get the bios to boot from my USB than it did when Windows was installed. Anyway, I got the boot priority swapped round so it loads from the USB first, but under the troubleshooting option on the Fedora 40 live USB it only gave me the choice to launch Fedora with basic graphics, there’s no memory test or anything else. Should I try to turn off secure boot in the bios? (Btw, I also found that hp has its own memory test option in the bios if that’s any use)
For memory testing, nothing better than https://www.memtest.org/ .
From your description, there are no crashes. It is the graphic interface that fails, and closing all your software running, bringing you back to the login screen. Post the results of memtest first.
Will do, but how do I access memtest from a Fedora live USB? When I select the ‘troubleshooting’ option, the only option it gives me is to start fedora live in the basic graphics mode
You should go to the site instead of giving random answers. There is no access to memtest from Linux, or any other OS for that matter. You boot from memtest and it checks your memory, over and over again.
Go on the site, read the instructions, download memtest, put it on a USB drive, boot with that, and wait.
Sorry for the irrelevant question, but when I ran the command you mention here it said it’s uninstalling a bunch of kernel packages (all version 6.11.4-201.fc40). Why is it doing that?
Some cleanup is needed after updating. Since you are on Fedora 41 you should usually not need Fedora 40 packages. The exception is older packages that are no longer maintained – usually because a newer and maintained package now provides similar functionality.
Thanks for editing to specify the exact location, there’s been a lot of simple things I’ve needed to do that’ve been weirdly hard to find out about…Is there a good place for me to put a brief memtest guide for the sake of other noobs? Anyway, here’s my first memtest result:
I’ve just set Gnome to Xorg and tried a bunch of games and they all ran properly, without everything closing like I described before. BeamNG.Drive did make the entire system unresponsive after I tried to load a map, but to be fair it did warn me that I don’t have enough free ram, and even then it didn’t exit to the command line
I’ve been using Vivaldi on X11 for a decent amount of time since I made that post, no signs of the issue so far. Assuming the problem doesn’t come back, is there anything I can try to get wayland working better, or do I have to just hope it gets an update that makes it work better with my laptop?
BTW, Vivaldi is a javascript “skin” on top of Chromium.
It should’t be able to crash the system.
And on my Fedora 41 Chromium DOES NOT use Wayland with whatever “flag” enabled, it defaults on XWayland.
My advice is to use Vivaldi is you really need one or more of its features, otherwise if those features don’t make difference, use Chromium.
Generally the less the better.
