Hi All. I’m having an issue that I am hoping I can get some help with.
I have been using linux on this particular laptop for over a year now, and for the past 6 or so months (right around the time I upgraded to Plasma 6, but I think it is just a coincidence) about 50% of the time, when I update all my packages via package manager, the whole system freezes. Like, hard freezes. Waiting any amount of time won’t get me out of it. I have to hold the power button to power it down. I can’t use ctrl+alt+F3 or whatever to get another TTY. Mouse doesn’t move. Nothing works.
It originally happened with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on btrfs. I thought maybe it was btrfs, so I reinstalled with ext4. Same issue. I tried Manjaro. Same issue. I tried EndeavourOS (wasn’t really expecting different behavior at this point). Same issue.
Now I am thinking, what could cause an issue like this? Well, a package manager update just is a ton of file I/O operations, right? Could I have bad RAM and that is getting written to disk? Well, I did a memtest today and it came back perfect. So now I’m thinking it might be the SSD, but I’m not even sure how to check that.
Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on or what I should do to fix it or debug it?
I have the same problem with an older macbook air and linux, and I bought a new SSD for it (will be here at the end of the month, since it’s a special pre-ssd model). Husband, who’s an engineer, said that such hard freezes are usually the ssd’s fault, and not the memory’s (he said memory creates other kinds of crashes, but not this kind of hard freeze).
Well, I just reinstalled on a new SSD this morning. Fingers crossed it all works out! It usually takes a few weeks for the issues to start happening each time, so I guess I’ll just wait in agony until then. 🥲