My Zorin is a mess and feels like on thin ice

General Help
1

Early on, i would load into desktop and only early on i always get 2 or 3 error prompt and 1 Zorin error prompt. they were unknown and didn’t effect much so i figured i ignored and close them afterwards since nothing happens until then.

in the mid stage my device became slightly unstable:
-i have to boot twice. the first boot gets stuck at "loading initial ramdisk..."
the second boot takes about 15 seconds but boots up normal
-leaving it idle with nothing running would cause it to hard freeze.
sometime logs out and log in by itself, or at times stays logged out.
the solution for this was to put on a 24 hour youtube video.
-Firefox was crashing frequent.
-zorin frequent updates stutters and slows performance
-GPU (nvidia) driver takes at least 2 days after update to properly display live wallpaper and games were unplayable for this duration

Currently as of this post:
-watching videos (VLC) from my external SSD would crash and
sometimes hard freeze and needs a reset. one time the freeze happens twice in a row
-the day after, i was suddenly stuck booting into Busybox initramfs and obviously due to all the frequent hard freeze/crash. thankfully managed to solve that
-the next thing, boot stuck thrice with "loading initial ramdisk" on the first and black screen on the second and third.
-Playing osu!, a very light game that plays at 1000fps(1ms) is stuttering.
-emulator that are mostly stable (PCSX2/Duckstation) happens to crash when they previously dont

it feels like the system files is currently in conflict and scrambled to the point i do not have any control. i have so many important files but at the same time i feel like my device has too much issues that it needs a reinstall. Its so unstable.

System specs:

sam-bridges@sambridges
OS: Zorin OS 17.3 x86_64
Host: OMEN by HP 16.1 inch Gaming La
Kernel: 6.8.0-124-generic
Uptime: 1 hour, 48 mins
Packages: 3474 (dpkg), 100 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.1.16
Resolution: 2560x1440
DE: GNOME 43.9
WM: Mutter
WM Theme: Everforest-Dark-BL-MOD
Theme: Everforest-Dark-BL-MOD [GTK2/
Icons: Marisa-Kirisame [GTK2/3]
Terminal: gnome-terminal
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 6800H with Radeon G
GPU: AMD ATI 06:00.0 Rembrandt
GPU: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3070 Ti Lapt
Memory: 5480MiB / 15201MiB

Nvidia Driver ver: 580.173.02

2

You could save Your Data and make a fresh Install when Your System really in common behaves not well. This Way, You can first sort out what Data You really need and the unneccessary Stuff, You can let go. And when the System is installed, You only install the Stuff what You currently really need.

2 Likes
3

I see you have a lot of Flatpak apps on your system. Having done some searches, Flatpaks can be responsible for freezing and system crashes. Are there not .deb alternatives?

1 Like
4

although its been 2 years. i still have not getting the hang of using linux. and i left a lot of trails

5

For the Flatpaks, You could check how old they are and how long they didn't get any Updates. When the Developer/Maintainer of it doesn't support it anymore, it could be a Factor when old Dependencies are there.

You could use the Command flatpak list to get a List of all installed Flatpaks. It lists the packed Dependencies, too.

But what You describe above sounds for me that the System is indeed a bit messed up. So a fresh Install and after that a well-thought Installation of Programs You need could bring fresh Air in the System.

3 Likes
6

... and perhaps consider installing the new version 18.1 :wink:

7

I was thinking it was probably an Nvidia issue.

This was from an AI generated query and may be worth a try:

  • Post-Update Failures : System updates can break driver functionality. If this occurs, users may need to boot into Recovery Mode , purge existing drivers (sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*' ), and reinstall the recommended driver via the Additional Drivers app or terminal.