When I use libreoffice writer, every now and then my entire system freezes. Usually when selecting more than a few words of text, but it does not happen every time I select a paragraph (have not been able to reproduce the bug when I tried, but it happens often enough on important documents to be very annoying). EDIT: I am not talking about huge and complicated documents here: This has happened to files with less than one page of text, only a few formatting options (bold text and bullet points I think) without any pictures or graph or anything!
In the frozen state I can only move the mouse and interestingly the sound keeps playing, but I can't click anything or enter the console. (It's not the typical "libreoffice turning grey because it's overwhelmed" where you just wait until it passes. It's a complete freeze, and the only option is to press the power button.
I'm using Libreoffice version 5.1.6.2 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (kernel version 4.13.0-36-generic), with a Lenovo Thinkpad 13 (Intel i3 core, 16 GB RAM).
I've found similar problems described e.g. here...
However, the solutions mentioned in the previous threads don't seem to help me. I don't think I can "turn off transparency" in the writer (I'm not drawing any transparent areas there), and I don't think I have a NVIDIA graphics card. I tried to figure out the later:
lspci | grep VGA
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Sky Lake Integrated Graphics (rev 07)
What do you recommend? I would highly appreciate your help!
EDIT: I have the little system monitor running and as far as I remember, CPU was never too busy when the freeze occurred, probably below 15-20%. (Of course that display also stopped showing me more recent results when the system had frozen - but CPU-usuage definitely did not go up visibly right before the freeze).
UPDATE 1: I tried out the following:
Under System settings - Software & updates - Additional drivers, my only listed item is "Unknown:Unknown". The tag is, by default, on "do not use the device". I changed it to "Using Processor microcode firmware for Intel CPUs from intel-microcode (open source)".
I just worked half an hour on a libreoffice writer document and nothing froze so far! :)
UPDATE 2: Seems like the driver change is not really a solution yet. I worked another hour or so on a libreoffice writer document without problems at first. But then I selected two rows that I wanted to move in a table, and had a new type of crash: This time, the system only froze for a short time (same symptoms as above, could only move the mouse) but then it logged me out automatically and threw me back to the log-in screen. I suppose that's a bit better than having to shut down the computer via the power button... Still not solved though.
UPDATE 3: Working on libreoffice writer (same document with the tables in it that crashed yesterday) all day - no problems so far! So I definitely count this as an improvement!
memtest
that the memory (RAM) hardware is good?