System Specs before starting:
Fedora 43
KDE Plasma
Wayland
i7-6700K
GeForce GTX 1660 super
32 GB memory (unsure if ddr3 or ddr4)
Hi! Recently I convinced my partner to make the switch to linux, specifically, Fedora. However, sometimes her computer will just completely freeze, and requires a hard reboot, I haven't gotten the chance to test if reisub works while it's frozen. Also, very, very rarely, it will come back to life, or show some signs of life; today, it froze, but I could still hear her over our call, and then it slowly advanced the display over the next couple minutes- as in the mouse was moving very slowly according to how she was moving her mouse when it froze- before stopping again and requiring a reboot.
I'm pretty sure this has been happening since day 1, fresh install, so I don't think it's anything we did/installed that broke things.
My gut tells me that it's an issue with her memory, but it seems like the majority of the time, it happens while using graphically intensive apps/games, but that's not always consistent. This leads me to think it's actually an nvidia issue, we've tried both the neuveau and proprietary drivers, but it happens on both.
Does anyone have any ideas about this?
Almost certainly a Nvidia issue, and that's such a deep rabbit hole, I don't even know where to start.
...It's not a fun troubleshooting/learning process.
The most expedient thing would be to try Bazzite or Nobara for a while. Both are Fedora based distros (so they're familiar), but they have better support for older Nvidia cards out of the box.
This would be a better long term solution anyway, as whatever's going wrong, you wont have to maintain it yourself through updates.
As someone with an ancient 750ti happily running on the regular nvidia drivers...
Dedicated support for "older cards" as in "requiring different drivers" usually starts much later (Kepler and before), so about 4 generations before an 1660Super.
I thought there was a cutoff for pascal cards too?
Kind of... the regular driver officially supports everything from Maxwell to the newest cards.
But then there is the new open source driver now, supporting Turing and above. Which is recommended to try by Nvidia developers, but also still has issues (like power management problems on Turing for example).
Also CUDA-specific stuff still pulls the proprietary driver as a requirement anyway.
That’s what I was thinking of, thanks.
I did consider trying that, but I'm just not sure how easy it would be to switch distros. I did make sure she set up her home directory as a separate partition, so that should make it easier, but the rest is still unfamiliar to me.
I've had good luck keeping the home partition and just reinstalling the OS. Set it up with the same user name and home directory and you're done.
Also, random thing, but I did not get a notification for your reply.
I don't think that's a piefed thing, as it happens a lot to me, even with other .world users.
Nuke everything and start over? I guess you could keep the home directoy, but TBH I'd back it up and nuke it too, just in case.
Or, as a shorter term solution, run it off a USB drive.