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I've been using this distro for about 8 months now. It used to work fine, however, for the past ~3 months it's begun randomly crashing. It usually happens between 2-4 times a day and it's becoming worse.

I need to fix it, however, I'm completely lost as to how to go about troubleshooting it—especially since when it happens my OS is basically unusable.

Here's what happens when it freezes:

  • All apps and the OS GUI become unresponsive. I can sometimes move my mouse a few pixels every few seconds, until the OS becomes completely unresponsive and I need to reboot.
  • Audio stops, loops, or is super laggy.

I suspect it's due to a memory leak, although I have 8GB of ram (which is a fair amount) and that's always worked fine on other OS like Windows. As for any other specs, I have a decent PC (including an Intel Core i5-4670K and Radeon R9280X).

I'm not running any intensive applications, either, and even if I was I'd expect a functional PC. I primarily use my PC for web development, so I typically only use a few lightweight apps (like Atom, a few terminal windows/processes, Firefox or Chrome, and Spotify).

It just happened before whilst only having Spotify and the latest Firefox open (which is very performant, and I only had a few tabs open), so I suspect it's due to something deeper in the OS.

What could the issue be, and what should I do from here to troubleshoot and solve it?

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    You can file a bug report at launchpad.net or you could try a newer kernel like 4.14.16, 4.14.17 or 4.15.1 or you could try an older kernel > 3 months ago. Feb 5, 2018 at 3:10
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    Bug reports are good, but Ubuntu 17.04 went EOL 13-Jan-2018 so don't expect any action on it. I'd suggest your 17.04 should be release-upgraded to 17.10 for security reasons (17.04 was not patched for meltdown, spectre or many recent issues)
    – guiverc
    Feb 5, 2018 at 4:48
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    Possible duplicate of How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release?
    – N0rbert
    Feb 5, 2018 at 11:06
  • @N0rbert I've had real trouble figuring this out myself and I wasn't aware that the solution was upgrading my OS/kernel. The issue could've easily been something else.
    – Daniel
    Feb 6, 2018 at 0:04

1 Answer 1

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I had the same problem as you. Maybe your kernel is not working properly with the drivers you have to use. Try to install another kernel version and see if it helps. (Works most of the time).

An amazing program for doing that is Ukuu.

First add the repositories:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa

Now update them:

sudo apt-get update

Install the program:

sudo apt-get install ukuu

And then launch it from the launchpad or via the terminal by:

sudo ukuu-gtk

enter image description here

Inside the program, you can choose the kernel you want. Then, it downloads and installs it. As the program indicates, those are the common errors that you have, caused by a non compatible kernel.

Hope it helps...

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  • Thanks, I just installed the latest kernel. I'm also going to upgrade to 17.10. I'll try using it over the next few days and see how it goes.
    – Daniel
    Feb 5, 2018 at 3:33

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