> What do you recommend doing when Linux Freezes? It doesn't come up a lot, but when it does it can be kind of unnerving since the three-finger-salute doesn't work.
Unfortunately, I don't really have a solution for this. I have an SSD as the main disk and _even now_, when I hit this too hard Linux grinds to a halt. No mouse, no keyboard, just heat, fans and disk light.
One thing that sometimes works for me is the old CTRL+ALT+FX mashing, but not always. Once you can get a shell you can type into you're okay, but of course this doesn't always work.
> I would also love to know if anybody has a solution for getting video to play properly in Firefox. I know it's not a bug per se, but it would be nice to not have to switch between browsers all the time.
What do you mean? It's been reliable for quite a long while? There were two issues I used to have, one was not having my graphics card setup (it was running from the CPU) and the other was not having flash (when that was something).
> I've been using Ubuntu for about a year now and otherwise its been a very positive experience.
Yeah, I think it makes one of the better daily drivers.
Thank you for your answer. It's good to know that dealing with freezes is not a problem only faced by newbs like myself.
Re: playing video, for some reason I can't play South Park on either Firefox or Chrome. Videos on twitter also won't load with Firefox, though they work fine with Chrome.
> Thank you for your answer. It's good to know that dealing with freezes is not a problem only faced by newbs like myself.
Yeah, it's another bug with Desktop based Linux. The problem is that Linux "basically" treats the GUI like any other program, when things get heavy everything gets roughly evenly screwed. OSes designed to be centralized around a GUI on the other hand usually guarantee that GUI related processes get a minimum amount of time on the CPU to ensure they don't freeze.
Linux should 100% be doing this. Doing lots of hardware I/O shouldn't mean you lose the mouse or keyboard. When you lose control of input, you think the machine isn't doing something, when in actual fact it's doing tonnes, it's just not showing you. Even something like Android suffers from this under heavy load, it's really crap.
The real joke is, it's probably a difficult kernel fix. You would need some kind of watch dog timer for the kernel to make sure it's not getting too bogged down with any one particular task and then interrupt ones that are (some tasks don't like to be interrupted) [1]. You then need make sure that all of the heavy kernel calls don't make guarantees about the call being completed (i.e. blocking), which to be completely honest should be the default position to take anyway.
I'm not completely up-to-date on this, but my bet is that the issues come from everywhere. Programs can read/write arbitrarily large amounts of data (RAM, disk, network, bus, etc), when I believe you should be able to ask the kernel what size it would like you to read/write based on I/O activity and the capabilities of the device. If your program is bogging down the kernel, it should lover your recommended block read/write size. Better yet, this would be compatible with existing software, as they could choose to ignore this, possibly with it "punishing" programs that eat up lots of kernel time by making them wait longer for their next opportunity. There's a bunch of algorithms for time splicing tasks, but the most optimal appears to be max-min with very little organizing overhead [2].
> Re: playing video, for some reason I can't play South Park on either Firefox or Chrome. Videos on twitter also won't load with Firefox, though they work fine with Chrome.
Hmm, that shouldn't happen, sounds like you potentially have some system-wide badness. A few things to try:
* Disable any customization you made (extensions, add-ons, etc) - see if it is one of these interfering
* Make sure you have all updates and you're running an up-to-date version of Ubuntu (this issues have possibly been patched already)
* Make sure you have the correct drivers installed for your GPU
But... One thing I did note was that JavaScript coin miners have gotten so bad that I can't run certain sites without ad-blockers anymore (uBlock Origin is generally recommended). I remember my CPU sitting at one core maxed out just because of the JS engine. I generally run uBlock Origin + NoScript on every page and manually enable temporary scripts on pages I trust. One of the biggest offenders for crazily heavy JS was actually Facebook.
I thought about your comment re: video and I did some more poking around online since I was hoping to avoid having to do a fresh install. I tried updating my video codecs and now Netflix/Hulu works! Hooray!
>> JavaScript coin miners have gotten so bad that I can't run certain sites without ad-blockers anymore
Whoa, is that the reason why some websites are eating a ton of memory?? Is this common?
>> I generally run uBlock Origin + NoScript on every page and manually enable temporary scripts on pages I trust.
Thank you for the recommendations, I'll check those out.
> I thought about your comment re: video and I did some more poking around online since I was hoping to avoid having to do a fresh install. I tried updating my video codecs and now Netflix/Hulu works! Hooray!
Yeah, it's important to pull updates regularly :) In general many of the bugs you'll come across will end up being fixed sooner or later, so it's worth checking regularly.
> Whoa, is that the reason why some websites are eating a ton of memory?? Is this common?
That and just the poor use of JS. Most websites really don't need JS. I use mbasic.facebook.com instead of facebook.com as it'll run without JS, plus you have to manually refresh to get any kind of notification.
Unfortunately, I don't really have a solution for this. I have an SSD as the main disk and _even now_, when I hit this too hard Linux grinds to a halt. No mouse, no keyboard, just heat, fans and disk light.
One thing that sometimes works for me is the old CTRL+ALT+FX mashing, but not always. Once you can get a shell you can type into you're okay, but of course this doesn't always work.
> I would also love to know if anybody has a solution for getting video to play properly in Firefox. I know it's not a bug per se, but it would be nice to not have to switch between browsers all the time.
What do you mean? It's been reliable for quite a long while? There were two issues I used to have, one was not having my graphics card setup (it was running from the CPU) and the other was not having flash (when that was something).
> I've been using Ubuntu for about a year now and otherwise its been a very positive experience.
Yeah, I think it makes one of the better daily drivers.