Hello,
I have a very annoying problem on an HP laptop using Fedora 39 with Gnome: since a couple of weeks now, the system completely freeze shortly after the boot + user logging process.
In the gnome welcome screen, if I try to launch an application from the dash, computer behaves normally at 1st with the desktop going full screen and the mouse rolling, but then nothing happens and the mouse returns to normal state without the application appearing.
In that state if I try again to open the application, I have same behavior: the application does not open. If I try to reboot the system by clicking on the upper right corner, everything freeze (can’t move the mouse and keyboard is no longer responsive).
Only way out is to force reboot using the power button. Usually it solves the issue and I can use the laptop for a day or two. But it is not always the case and I had once to reboot 3 times in a row.
Software updates did not solved the issue and choosing older kernels does not seems to avoid the issue.
Looking at errors in the jounalctl do not seem to be different between freeze and not freeze, but I’m not expert.
It sounds like a problem with a particular application. You might try leaving top running in a terminal window while you try to launch the app. Watch to see if the program shows as running even though no GUI appears. If the program is using all the system’s resources, that might be why the system seems to freeze.
If it is a problem with a particular program, you’ll have to find that program’s logs to figure out why it isn’t working properly. Sometimes you can get some runtime feedback from the program by launching it from a terminal window.
It is not related to a particular app. It can freeze trying to open the gnome terminal itself, or the ressource monitor or 2-3 other apps.
When I am able to open the ressource monitor, I can see that the 2 cores are busy for 10 sec and then are at 0%. Since then I wait 10 sec after loggin, but freeze still happens randomly (50%-60% of the time).
In that case I would suspect either a bad/glitchy driver or bad hardware such as a defective memory module. I think I would run a test on the system memory first. You should be able to download a bootable CD image for Memtest86+ from here: https://www.memtest.org/
If it is not the memory, it might be a problem with a driver. But there should be logs that would indicate if that were the problem.
It could also be a bad hard drive or even something like a bad cable or connection to your hard drive. You can run something like sudo smartctl -x /dev/sda to get a readout of your hard drive’s “health”.
The hardware drivers for Linux come with the Linux kernel. If the problem is a buggy driver, you can try selecting a different kernel when your system is booting to see if a different version of the driver resolves the problem (and if you find that such is the case, please report the kernel version and hardware that are exhibiting the problem).