Editing text files (code), executing simple programs in the terminal (work is done on my Mac Studio, not my personal desktop), browsing the web with Firefox and playing the odd Steam game. I use the stock Opensuse Tumbleweed panel setup and don’t even tweak the animation speeds or configured effects.

So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong.

My hardware is old-ish (Ryzen 1800x and a Vega56) but I’ve had no issues in literally any other environment, use stock drivers with no customizations, no custom kernels or anything, and only with packages from the official repos, so I don’t believe I should have many major quirks. Heck, I don’t even have Bluetooth or wifi enabled.

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terribleperson 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Are you certain the Vega56 is still healthy and stable?

It's possible it's just KDE, but it's also possible KDE is triggering hardware issues.

RAM is also always one to check, especially on an older machine.

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ahartmetz 4 days ago | parent [-]

Might be a driver issue, too. I remember Vega as a sort of short-lived in-between generation with especially many driver problems.

Actually, early Ryzen 1800X also crashed under certain workloads on Linux, especially compilation and downloading games on Steam(!) IME - another KDE guy and me were some of the first world-wide to communicate about the problem. AMD had a hardware replacement program, maybe it's still active.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ryzen-Segv-Response should get you started. People made special software packages to trigger the hardware problem in a minute or so.

There was IIRC another problem with early Ryzen, something about transitions from idle power causing instability, fixed by essentially raising idle power consumption a little with a special BIOS switch and / or playing with load line calibration. That one crashed the whole computer, not just the offending program. (Actually, crashes while downloading games on Steam might have been that one.)

And yes, do run memtest (from the boot menu) for a couple of hours or over night, too.

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terribleperson 4 days ago | parent [-]

The bootable, free memtest86+ is excellent for memory testing (not to be confused with Passmark's memtest86).

I concur on the driver issues. To my understanding the Vega driver situation is actually better on Linux than on Windows (or at least it used to be), but it's never been well-supported hardware.

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dvdkon 4 days ago | parent [-]

Vega GPUs should be very well supported, especially for basic desktop stuff, since Ryzen mobile CPUs shipped with Vega cores for many years after the dedicated GPU line.

	▲	ahartmetz 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I had one of these, but I suspect that the hardware is quite different.

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fooker 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> So I don’t think I’m holding it wrong.

I think you are.

As an experiment, try a fresh VM of your distro and see if it still crashes.

Rolling distros are not an exact science. They can can get stuck in weird inconsistent states because of some local modification or stagnant dotfile or configuration that is not forward compatible. That sort of thing is more likely with complex software, it's usually not a bug unless upgradeability is a seriously supported thing.

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yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago | parent [-]

I mean, that's still not the user holding anything wrong, it's fundamentally a distro problem.

	▲	Oxodao 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		"holding it wrong" is a reference to Steve Job's conference on the iphone 4. It was a design flaw that made the phone problematic so that's more of a way of saying "I think I use it properly" rather than "I think I use it as intended"

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Propelloni 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Hmh, I'm running Tumbleweed on a Ryzen 5 7600 and an AMD Rx 7800. Like you I don't fiddle with the defaults and this is my gaming rig (I'm working on starting just into Steam). I just have default KDE Plasma to launch Steam and play my games, I do my work on a Debian Trixie laptop. I have set up TW two years ago and only DUP-ed it since then. Actually, it is more stable then the Debian machine :o

I know, this is not helping you in any way. I only encountered weird instability with Linux when my RAM was not OK. Maybe check your RAM?