So I have been running Zorin OS on a Mac Pro 2013 with dual AMD FirePro D500 video cards for a few weeks now and I am getting pretty fed up with it. Initially had problems even getting it to run until I disabled Wayland and went back to X11.
Now I'm experiencing random system freezes where the whole system just locks up out of the blue. I've tried accessing logs to look for errors but the logs just seem to stop at the same time the freeze occurs. No messages prior to indicate there are issues just it was fine...freeze...reboot...it's fine again with zero details of what caused the freeze event.
Memory tests and harddrive tests show no errors so my only thinking now is the weird dual video card setup that this machine uses is involved but have no logs to back up my thinking.
Wondering if anyone has any idea how else to access some level of logging that might actually point to the culprit. Has anyone else tried getting Zorin to run on one of these Trashcans and been successful?
When these Freezes hapen, do the only happen when using a Program or in Idle, too? Does it happen primary when using a Browser? If yes disable Hardware Acceleration.
I do not believe I have any access to disable Secure Boot or Fast Boot on a Macintosh...in fact I'm pretty sure that on the 2013 Mac Pro that option doesn't even exist (from my research).
I have previously tried turning off Hardware Acceleration in Firefox, Brave, and Opera and the freezing continues to happen even with Hardware Acceleration off.
I have left a VM running overnight and the system is still responsive in the morning. I have left a video playing in Brave for hours and the system stays responsive.
To reproduce the issue most consistently I have to have both a browser window going AND be using another application like a Virtual Machine or Citrix Remote Desktop. Even then it's unpredictable when the freeze will occur. It could take hours or it could be as soon as I open a new tab or start a video.
I'm not saying it is the issue but is Citrix Remote Desktop setup correctly? I only ask this as seeing you mention it brought back memories when I was an IT Contractor. Attended a job that an employee of the firm was installing Citrix client and had somehow ended up pulling all the software from the Citrix Server to the Desktop in error (MS Office seats all got allocated to one machine - you can imagine the number of exponential help desk calls occurring!)
The correct way to setup Citrix is to not set it up at all imo
That said I've had lock ups with it running and with it not running. I can remote in successfully so from that perspective it is "working" but it is certainly one of the things that I see the most freezes with.
Power is set to high performance and the time between freezes is random. sometimes very soon after launching my Virtual machine other times not for hours
OK
So I got fed up and decided to try something radical. I exported all the error logs I could find and threw them into an AI and asked it to analyze the root cause of the freezing issue.
Here is what it came back with:
Diagnosis – What actually froze your systemAfter looking at all the logs you sent, the real culprit is crystal-clear:Your GPU is an old AMD Tahiti (Radeon HD 7970 / R9 280X) running on the open-source radeon driver in kernel 6.14.This combination is known to be completely unstable on kernels ≥ 6.8 (and especially bad on 6.11+).
The classic symptom is exactly what you experienced:The screen freezes hard (no TTYs, no REISUB).
Nothing useful in the current journal because the GPU lockup stops everything.
Repeated messages in dmesg during boot like
radeon 0000:02:00.0: [drm] Cannot find any crtc or sizes
and later GPU ring timeouts / GPU hangs that never get logged because the whole machine is already dead.
This is a GPU hard hang caused by the radeon driver on a Southern-Islands card (Tahiti) with modern kernels. AMD officially dropped support for these cards from the amdgpu driver, and the old radeon driver has been bit-rotting for years. Kernel 6.14 simply finishes it off.The freeze happens most often when the browser (hardware-accelerated) + a VM (which also wants GPU passthrough or heavy graphics) both stress the GPU at the same time.Proof from your logsgpu_errors.txt → Tahiti card, radeon driver loaded, lots of “Cannot find any crtc or sizes” at boot (already a red flag)
No OOM killer activity (62 GiB RAM, only ~3 GiB used, swap untouched)
No obvious VM-related errors in the current boot (the hang kills logging before anything useful appears)
Multiple people with the exact same card report total lockups on kernel 6.11–6.14 that instantly disappear when they switch to kernel 5.15 or 6.5 LTS.
You could try it with Zorin 17 - it is still supported for two years. Or you can install an older kernel on Zorin 18 with the mainline installer tool to test if it would help.
Older hardware often runs better with old kernels and older OS versions.
