So, is it normal that KDE Neon is incredibly unstable?
I recently bought a brand new computer, Ryzen 2400G with a nice nvme ssd and 32 gigs of good memory to run Linux on. I want to run KDE, but .. it just crashes all the time.
I have several crashes every day, of a variety of types, but mostly the browser I'm using starts losing tabs. Once that happens, it doesn't matter what I do, all programs I open will be more unstable, until I reboot. It might be a problem with memory allocation? - if I open a lot of tabs or more than one program within a minute or two, it seems to occur more, but I can't provoke it to happen.
The system is also not the same after each reboot - sometimes the Bluetooth module will be turned off on boot, other times it will be on. Sometimes it can't connect to anything before being restarted, other times it works fine. Sometimes the program installer opens on boot without it being open when I shut down the computer, but not always.
Just now Chromium died and caused the system to not respond to mouse clicks, something I have not seen before.
I am used to modern operating systems that just .. work, a program crashing happening once in weeks, if not months, and not dragging down the OS with it.

I have a windows partition, and that is .. as stable as windows has ever been; I don't think it's a hardware problem.

In case it matters, AMD 2400G, ASUS ROG STRIX B450-I GAMING, 32GB 3200MHz, 500GB NVME, Dell P2415Q.

And now the youtube tab I had running just crashed.

Soft reboot; I had tabs crashing all over the place.
This time bluetooth was off when it came up. It was on and connected to my headset when I rebooted.
It's the third reboot this morning.

I have crashing tabs again, and Chromium just came down completely. Rebooting.
Bluetooth was off this time when it came up.

larsgottlieb wrote:So, is it normal that KDE Neon is incredibly unstable?

No, not usual.

I would suspect hardware or graphics given the issues you have. Possible they either do not affect Windows, or Windows has some fudges built in to work around things.

Thanks for the reply.

The system just froze completely, no response to input. Hard reset. BT came up off this time too.

Do you have a GPU? I used to get lots of browser window crashes with nouveau driver on Nvidia quadro. But the whole system wouldn't freeze.

Open a terminal and see the output of

```
$ sudo journalctl -f
```

Thank you for the reply. Here's the output:

Hardware specs are in the first post; I use a Ryzen 2400G APU; no discrete GPU.

It ran for a couple hours without incident after I upgraded to 4.20 this afternoon, but that has happened before ..

A new one came up today:

I'd just told Chromium to open up about a dozen tabs, when a message popped up saying some decompressor(?) had died. I closed the message and everything but the mouse cursor was unresponsive - I could move it around, but the whole screen was otherwise frozen, all animations had stopped and I couldn't interact with anything.

Hard reset, everything seems ok-ish again now ..

If you have space available on the hard drive, you might consider creating another partition and installing other linux distros like (k)ubuntu or opensuse to see if the problem is specific to KDE Neon or if something is just not (well) supported on linux.

Thank you for the reply.
I actually switched to Manjaro KDE this wednesday.
It seems to have the same browser crash problems, only it's not as frequent, and it hasn't frozen up on me - yet.
I really wish I could find out what it is that dies though, so the problem could be addressed directly, instead of just switching distros in the hope of finding something stable ..

larsgottlieb wrote:Thank you for the reply.
I actually switched to Manjaro KDE this wednesday.
It seems to have the same browser crash problems, only it's not as frequent, and it hasn't frozen up on me - yet.
I really wish I could find out what it is that dies though, so the problem could be addressed directly, instead of just switching distros in the hope of finding something stable ..

Well now that you're on Manjaro I'm not sure of the correct advice. I have Raven Ridge on my laptop (2500U w/ Vega 8 ). I use the Padoka PPA to keep the graphics side of things updated and have had no stability issues. I use the unstable PPA.

Stable https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dia ... untu/pkppa
Unstable https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dia ... buntu/mesa

Browsers use some degree of GPU acceleration, so this could help. Raven Ridge and mobile Vega are still somewhat new and are constantly being updated.

Thanks for the reply.

According to the guides I've found, Manjaro identifies the GPU automatically. It is definitely more stable, if not exactly rock stable, so far.

It's neither Neons nor KDE's fault.

AMD APUs require a recent Kernel and KDE Neon comes with 4.15, which is too old.

According to this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page= ... -may&num=1
you need min. Kernel 4.17 and Mesa 18.2.

You could have also done some research before buying this AMD system before blaming it on someone else. AMD support will get better in the future with upcoming updates.

Thanks for the reply.

I did note that Ryzen APU support is dependent on a fairly recent core, and thus the first thing after installing was to upgrade the kernel, even though the Neon distro I installed came with a 4.18.04 kernel.
The trouble I reported is thus using the latest 4.19 and 4.20 kernels available, as you'd have noticed if you'd read the comments instead of jumping to conclusions.

Also note that while my original post did vent some frustration, I'm not trying to assign blame here.
I am pointing out weird and hard to track down instability, and trying to find help in assessing and patching it, something that would be useful to other users, and the KDE Neon admins at large.

Thank you for your time.