I'm committing to Linux, but it's so unstable. Any suggestions?

Using only non american oss is literally impossible.

If you're using Ubuntu make sure you're using the most recent LTS release instead of the latest one. Stability issues shouldn't be a problem on those.

I'd love to know what hardware you are using as well.

Choosing Ubuntu over Fedora because of American ties is rich

Framework fully supports Ubuntu and has full guides on them. If you have issues, I'd suggest posting on the Framework message boards, they're very responsive.

But with Linux, I just can’t believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.

That doesn't sound right.

Start with Linux Mint. I've helped Boomers use it. My dad has been using it as his daily driver for almost 5 years and he doesn't know the difference between an OS and a Word Processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice "Linux").

I'll likely be downvoted for this, but if you're committed to Linux, you might want to reconsider using Ubuntu (or Fedora for that matter). Ubuntu has a well-earned reputation for trying to make things "easy" by obfuscating what it's doing from the user (hence that useless error message). They're also a corporate distro, so their motivations are for their profit rather than your needs (wait 'til you had about Snap).

A good starting distro is Debian (known for stable, albeit older) software. It's a community Free software project and the 2nd-oldest Linux distro that's still running as well as the basis for a massive number of other distros (including Ubuntu). The installer is straightforward and easy too.

Or if you're feeling ambitious, I'd recommend Arch or Gentoo. These distros walk you through the install from a very "bare metal" perspective with excellent documentation. Your first install is a slog, but you learn a great deal about the OS in the process, ensuring that you have more intimate knowledge when something goes wrong.

Where did you get this laptop from? Did you buy it new or used?

The reason why I ask is because it sounds like you have hardware issues.

You need to stop worrying about “official support.” You aren’t a business so it doesn’t matter for you. There is more support out there online for free than you realize. There’s nothing magical framework does for you that doesn’t get ported out everywhere else eventually anyway. Stop limiting yourself like that.

That being said, Ubuntu is built in Debian. Debian is an incredibly solid and stable distro. Ubuntu does do a few questionable things with it but it’s still very reliable. If you have problems with stability, it’s very unlikely Ubuntu is the problem unless you did something so incredibly stupid to it support wouldn’t help you anyway.

I have a theory. Windows can dance around memory corruption issues in ways Linux just refuses to do. Windows will misbehave in strange ways trying to make things work until it just can’t anymore. Linux is more of a binary thing. It works or it doesn’t. It’s not going to play pretend for you. It refuses. Linus has an obscene hand gesture for your hardware.

I want you to get a copy of memtest86+ and boot it off a flash drive. Then just let it beat the shit out of your CPU and ram for a couple hours.

Framework laptops are generally Intel. Intel hasn’t been making the best stuff over the past few years. It’s possible your cpu might be affected by a flaw Intel tried to cover up for a while. If it has it, nothing in earth will ever make that chip reliable. It’s not fixable. It will only get worse with time no matter what OS you use.

You need to start with Linux mint. The errors you are mentioning are common in ubuntu, crashes happen and popup all the time on my ubuntu installations too. But never on Mint. Mint is based on the stable version of ubuntu, that it has long term support and it's regularly getting updates to make it even more stable and secure. So please start with Mint, or Debian 12 (although Mint is better for new users).

It’s certainly weird that you have these issues on a Framework + an officially supported distribution.

Does it really run flawlessly on Windows 11? Because we have Framework 13’s at work, which run W11 and they DO NOT run flawlessly.

What about a fresh installation of Ubuntu? Do you have issues then? It could be some kind of configuration that you do, that screws with your system?

Somewhat obvious tips to get a more stable experience:

• Use a distribution that favour stability over being on the bleeding edge. Like Debian stable, or another distribution that maintain LTS releases,
• Install software from the distribution's official package repositories. Avoid third party packages and repos as much as possible. If you really need a third party repo, verify it's compatible with your specific distro and has reputation for being well maintained,
• When you do see a problem, take time to troubleshoot and if necessary make a bug report with necessary information for developers to identify the problem, so there's a better chance to see it fixed.
• If you use Linux in a professional settings, there is paid support available out there, in some cases this get you priority for bug fixes.

Could this be a snaps thing?

I despise snaps and left Ubuntu for that reason. I don't remember the specifics but I think even after installing firefox with apt it somehow get's magically switched to a snap.

I daily drive debian on a t490s and it's rock solid. There's just no way anyone could consider this set up unstable.

In recent years I've found most of my problems come from the fancy new packages. In order of reliability I find that it goes apt > .dev > AppImage > flatpak > snap

I've been running Linux for 20+ years as well (on-amd-off for most of that, but mostly on). Stability has almost never been an issue, only when I was fucking around and finding out lol. My biggest problem in recent years was Ubuntu never having what I wanted, and Arch always having what I needed.... So I just moved to Arch and things have never been better.

People downvoting a post asking for help have very weak egos. I hope you’re able to find a better Linux experience, OP.

it sounds like something underlying is wrong, so would test everything that is underlying your system.

a memtest is the easiest first check. i wouldn't rely on the one that's on your system since it could be bad too, but it's still worth it give it a try since it only takes a few seconds. if it finds anything, then there's definately something wrong with your hardware.

instead, i would rely on a usb stick with the ubuntu image you downloaded. first verify that the checksum for the ubuntu image you have on a trusted computer is the same that ubuntu has on its website. then copy it to your usb stick and then use memtest from there. if it comfirms that your ram is okay, use ubuntu's installation tools to verify that image on the usb stick is good; google or deepseek can show you how with easy to copy/paste commands.

in your shoes, i would re-install because at his point because then there's confidence that the base steps are verified and should be working correctly and then you can move onto othere testing strategies if you continue to experience the same behavior.

I see your edits and I had the same experience with Ubuntu. For whatever reason on my ThinkPad I had bugs and just weird issues that no one else would run into every single time. And I would try Ubuntu after every major update and it would still be some weird bugs never the same ones.

I've now been using Fedora for almost 4 years it's solid. I always recommend enabling RPM fusion to get those proprietary codecs and I like to change my zram config to what is recommended on the arch wiki.

You ever run a memtest?

It's purely anecdotal but every time I've used an Ubuntu based distro it has been unstable or it nuked itself after 6 months to a year of use. I've been on fedora for 2-3 (4?) years now and I've not had a single issue apart from the Nvidia drivers behaving wonky sometimes.

Usually with Linux, once you start out you're gonna get a ton of issues and you'll have to troubleshoot them one by one. However, afterwards it should just be a smooth sailing.

Also as a word of warning from my personal experience, official support isn't something you should be that concerned about. When it comes to software, when some corporation makes some official version for a specific distribution (like Ubuntu), it usually is made by some B-team and doesn't work that great. If the program is good, it should be available on most major distros rather than just "an official version for just one" if that makes sense.

Also good call - if one distro is causing a fuck ton of issues, just give another one a try. The main difference for users between distros is what kind of software setup they are going with, and some setups are just prone to issues on some hardware or wasn't tested properly. Still, I do hope Fedora treats you better.

Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it… leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can’t fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.

This was my experience as well ... 20 years ago. I've not had many of these issues over the past few years using any distro. I used Debian for a couple years and now I'm on Arch. Really, it just works for me...

TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.

One thing I have noticed, however. When I search for how to fix or do something, nearly all websites and forums reference Debian/Ubuntu commands, so the fragmentation there is a little annoying

I'm using Nobara, which is based on Fedora, so I hear you, but the only thing you really need to do is learn enough about DNF to translate "apt" commands in your head.

And maybe set up a few aliases you're used to.

I started using Linux more or less full-time in 2014. I find it to be just as "stable" as Windows or OS-X, which is to say: it's stable until you do something that makes it not stable.

If you're staying in the mainstream, using a "stable release" from a big distro (Ubuntu, Debian, there are others...) and waiting at least 6 months after the release of that stable release before using it, I have found Ubuntu to be just as stable as Windows or OS-X. You might want to use an unstable app, that can be a problem in any OS, but granted: there aren't as many "stable" apps to choose from in Linux as Windows.

OS-X and their apps have burned me hard, repeatedly, for things that Windows and Linux had under control 10 years earlier.

The major difference in my WIndows vs Linux experiences has been: when you want something to work and it just doesn't, in Windows you have to shrug your shoulders and explain to your customers: It just doesn't work, there's nothing we can do. In Linux, you have the option to do the heavy lifting and make it work. It will frequently not be worth the effort, but if you're really determined you can fix just about anything in Linux.

Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted… all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.

Well, I'm pretty sure I had this happen once or twice in the recent past after wake from suspend I think, but it might be that my CPU is just one of the faulty intel ones.

Either way the rest of this does not reflect my experience at all. Try distrohopping, I feel like you'll find one that you like and doesn't have these issues. openSuSE is always one of my suggestions, it was the one that I used for a long time when I started out as well, but tbh I'm out of touch with the more mainstream distros, I've only touched Gentoo and NixOS in the past >5 years. (I also specifically recommend against using Ubuntu.)

Then I’ll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won’t.

Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I’ll get a popup asking to wait or quit.

Check journalctl --user, and also htop, specifically the process state, for the last one (you mention a NAS, is it perhaps stuck on IO? I'm in a fucked network where that regularly happens with my NAS.)

I work in a small lab. Our systems are controlled using two computers that run 24/7. The main real-time control stack is open source and open hardware. I happens in a Linux box that runs NixOS. I would trust my life to that machine and fly it to the end of the universe and back again. It just never fails. We can even run updates while everything keeps running undisturbed. Some devices need drivers that only work with Windows. The second computer runs those under Windows 11. In contrast we have to babysit that machine constantly, USB connections are unreliable, things fail randomly. When we have to update, the world comes to a halt. It‘s an amazing difference.

If you want to try a distro that can just work for you, instead of reading about it, do this:

• Aurora if you don't do gaming.
• Bazzite if you play games.

They are both from the Universal Blue family of distros which are based on Fedora Silverblue.

They are all immutable and atomic. They won't break. They will be more stable than windows. It will be easy. And it will come with batteries included.

Also, if you do gaming and are also a developer, there's bazzite-dx which will be releasing soon.

Surprised to hear stability questioned. We have RHEL systems at work that have been running 24/7 for over a year.

Unrelated to OP—

This community is the fuckin sauce! Y’all really jump in to support each other and it’s really cool :)

I just set up a usb boot for mint yesterday and am prepping my pc to switch once I feel confident enough about Linux. I’m starting to gather that will be much sooner knowing the community is here to help out! I can’t wait to get all my services switched to FOSS alternatives.

pebkac

Linux has always been the way you've described across many different distros for me over the years.

By far the most stable for me was Fedora. I've been running CachyOS over the last year or so and it's been solid.

Until today. For some reason KDE takes forever to startup now. A few apps have this problem as well.

This has not been my experience. I'm not on Ubuntu, but OpenSUSE and NixOS. Everything works and operates as expected everytime. The only issue once was nvidia driver updated versions before kernel did and I had to reboot to a previous snapshot and wait a few days till the kernel update was released to work with whatever happened to the driver. But 8 years of a dependable system otherwise

I use Debian on an old Thinkpad and (mostly) don't have such issues. Installs and upgrades in particular work fine. I had probs with the wifi driver on my x220 but it works fine on the similar t520. Framework might be trying to do too much.

NAS shared folders

now that is something that can easily make the system unstable, especially a laptop that will disconnect from the network at least ince in a while. my experience is with KDE, that if there's an unresponsive SMB mount 8n the filesystem, the whole KDE plasma environment fill freeze left and right, maybe with the exception of the window manager. but I have experienced this with other programs too. I suspect they all do filesystem accesses on the main thread and that's why when a directory read hangs, they can't do anything even handle clicksuntil the read times out.

its infuriating honestly, in a sense. of course, I have got all my money back lol. but it's like nobody is testing software with SMB shares, but I guess probably same goes for NFS, SSHFS or anything remote

Offhand anecdotes here as I only have Ubuntu on a 2012 MacBook.

That said the error post update is likely just a service that didn’t restart properly. Many of these are not necessarily critical, does it say what program crashed? A reboot would guarantee a fix here.

Unfortunately the issues with apps might be the snap packaging, this does slow apps down a bit which could cause pretty much all the remaining issues. I haven’t personally used it but might look up flatpak as a replacement and see if that helps. If others don’t explain how to do this I will try to come edit this later with an explainer or link or something to help.

For you I suggest this >> Aurora.

Everything will work out of the box, you won't get weird errors like Ubuntu gives, you can go back easily from GRUB if something goes wrong. Being an atomic distro may feel different but I'm sure you won't mind.

Another potential cause for random slowdown, errors and crashes could be overheating. Check that the fans are spinning and airflow is unobstructed. I don't remember from the top of my head and I'm not near a computer but maybe somebody else remembers his to check that all sensors are detected and operational.

Like @wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works just said, run memory test.

What hw do you have in that laptop?

something went wrong, but we're not sure what it is.

Check the system journal with

sudo journalctl -e

What do you mean by unstable? I don't get what this means. Install? Perhaps choosing a graphical install if available for your distribution of choice. I've heard nice things about Mint (can't tell, I'm using Artix, and Guix is in my plans).

That said, US or EU are not that different. Actually the EU is little by little deteriorating the data privacy it used to say it protected, but moreover, even if the data is kept in EU, what does it prevent US gov or corps to get access to the data? Did people forget about the 5 eyes, the extended ones (not sure how many, there were several extensions)? Did people forget that no matter the current differences, the EU and the US are allies (not just politically) any ways?

Linux (kernel) itself has already identified itself as a US org, since it complies with the US requirements and law, to the point of banning developers from countries the US doesn't like to be cooperating with US orgs (whether gov or not).

So, focusing on country based software developers shouldn't be the main motivation. Looking for free/libre software if possible, so that you get some freedoms of yours sort of intended to be protected through licenses, or if not available then open source, is what we should be looking for. On top of that, communication software should be e2ee, and if possible distributed or peer to peer, or at least decentralized, and so on. Also we tend to forget that the data kept in the cloud is no longer yours anymore, no matter the cloud, neither the country, and if in need to keep personal data on some cloud we should make sure it's encrypted, but still the data keeps being the cloud owner hands, so having personal backups is important, and clouds usually don't advertise what metadata they leak.

Having said that Fedora sounds OK to me while Ubuntu sounds too commercial to me and actually now a days looking for users to get packages from its own "app store". Instead of the "country of origin" for a distro, perhaps more importantly it is to see what your needs are, for example do you prefer rolling release vs. stable releases? Do you prefer vanila kind of packages (as close to upstream as possible) or your fine with the distro making changes to the upstream software as that serves better your purposes? How user friendly the distro is? Though perhaps you're out of options if the framework laptop requires firmware or patches not found upstream, then you might better stay with the "officially supported" distros, unless what you miss by not having such firmware or patches is something you can live with, but usually x86 laptops are "easily" used with gnu+linux on top, except for some drivers not fully working with your hardware or missing firmware, but people usually still uses those laptops with gnu+linux on top. For arm laptops (I believe framework has laptos with arm CPUs, and actually is offering some initial ones with risc-v cpus) that tends to be a little more involved and I personally have no experience with that, and actually I'm waiting for a cheap enough and not so low level risc-v laptop or mini-pc to start experimenting with it (not all distributions support arm and even less risc-v).

Again, I've heard nice things of Mint, particularly for people new to gnu+linux, and it's not a rolling release distribution. Though I'm one of those thinking that rolling relase distributions are easy to live with, at least not on the server spectrum (there are actually servers running on top of rolling release distributions such as Arch, but that's not the majority of them) given they can't afford reboots (very few updates actually require reboot on gnu+linux, linux/kernel itself being one of those which better get a reboot ASAP but not necessarily immediately) or changes requiring a service to drop even for a little while. But with rolling releases one doesn't have to deal with big differences between distribution major versions upgrades, and the changes requiring using intervention when upgrading packages are distributed on time, so no need to focus on a lot of them at once.

Just my two cents, :)

If it’s for work, I’d suggest using whatever works for you best. Sounds incredibly frustrating so I don’t know why’d you be so set on ditching windows. Use the tools that work for you. Having said that, I’ve been running Linux since early 0.99 kernels and Debian since 1.3 and stability is really unmatched these days.

Your screen flicker issues with browser sound like hardware acceleration related bugs and I’d hazard a quess that random freezes and reboots have something to do with graphics drivers as well. But of course it’s impossible to tell without logs, which you didn’t provide.

The latest Ubuntu defaults to using Wayland. On my Framework, it would freeze the whole box every few days. I switched to Xorg, and it was much better. (It's an option on the login screen - just clock the little cog and choose Xorg before you log in.)

I use Zorin OS 17 (based on ubuntu) on a desktop AMD based system and a framework laptop 16 for about a year now and even before that used an older version of Zorin OS for about 4 years on a shitty lenovo laptop and never had any stability problems. Even the lenovo still runs reliably.

The only problem I've had on the desktop is that the linux driver for an ntfs formatted drive constantly corrupted my data on that drive to the point where some of the data got lost. All other drives are formatted with ext4 and work without any problems. Maybe your problems could be similar?

I work on Linux and use Linux at home. I'll try to go through the problems you mentioned:

1. Just run the update command again in the GUI or terminal. If it doesn't work, we'll have to dig into apt with verbose logs but I haven't had apt break on me for over a decade unless I deleted something I shouldn't have.
2. Is Firefox installed as a snap/flatpak? That only happens with me occasionally when I installed flatpaks, they're just slower. Canonical can be a real arse about this stuff, they might switch packages to snaps without telling you and you might only come to know about it once you dig deeper.
3. All of these issues seem to related to your storage medium. Is the SSD OK? Open up the process monitor, sort by ascending order of disk writes/reads and open your applications one by one to see which one of them is the culprit.
4. Rebooting suddenly is not normal. Unfortunately, you'll have to go through logs for this one. Simple ones are dmesg and journalctl, we can dig deeper into them if you want to.

If I had my hands on your laptop I'd be running a vulnerability scan by now but I don't think the problem is serious enough to warrant it.

If you're on the 24.04 LTS release it might be worth upgrading to 24.10, as it has a lot of bug fixes and improvements from upstream, especially if you have a recent Framework board. Although it isn't your preferred option to change distros, it may be worth giving openSUSE Tumbleweed at least a test drive to see if it's an issue with your laptop or just an Ubuntu issue, as I have had Ubuntu have issues even on fully certified laptops, and openSUSE has been pretty plug and play for me on a secondary machine even with its faster update cycle. Might be worth checking your hardware too, as random hitches and reboots could indicate that you might need to reseat RAM or that the CPU/GPU is for whatever reason unstable.

Id switch to mint, most windows like and all the knowledge youve learned will work on it. If you want true stability go Debian.

Just FYI. My family has used linux for 25 years on many systems and we do not have stability issues. We use mostly Ubuntu or Debian.

Have no idea why your having issues. Could distro or hardware related. Also are you sure your storage media is good.

Great guidance here and I know you want to stick with Ubuntu, but but if you tire of trying to fix it try a different distro before you give up.

Lots of people swear by Ubuntu, but for others (like me) it's nothing but trouble. For instance, I get errors when running the latest version of Ubuntu on a current laptop that runs Debian 12 perfectly, and a previous Ubuntu load on one of our laptops (tried with a new SSD) had so many issues that I gave up and restored the Mint backup.

By contrast, we have 2 different laptops and one old desktop that run Linux Mint almost flawlessly. "Almost" means a system lock up every 3-4 months and the inability to wake from sleep for the desktop. Debian 12 was a bit more difficult to get fully working, but since the initial install it has been been completely stable with zero problems. We have one laptop that is running Windows 11 and it has more problems than any of the Linux machines.

Fixing problems is a great way to learn, but if it's not the way you want to spend your time you may be heading down the wrong path. Unless you have a hardware issue you should be able to find a distro that has few or none of the problems you've been fighting.

Arch also can absolutely be installed just as quickly as any other distro if you use the archinstall script. I used it recently to install KDE plasma onto a Chromebook from 2017 and everything worked exactly as expected, I haven't had any issues with stability so far. Can absolutely be done in under half an hour. It ofc doesn't come with the advantage of understanding exactly how your system is set up, like you would if you did it yourself.

The last time I did that (slightly different setup with xfce) though I broke it somehow and ended up with if freezing often when booting, although I'm still not sure if that was a hardware problem or not, but it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. I also broke something with the audio jack somehow around then during an update, but chromebooks have weird audio drivers and you need to use this script maintained by (afaik) one person in their spare time. Anyways I would expect a framework laptop to handle it better as it's newer and more common hardware.

Do your issues appear on a fresh install? At my admittedly limited level of expertise, I'd probably start from there. If a clean install works properly, then something that's happening later is messing it up. You'd have to keep track of changes you make to your system and check for issues as you go.

If a clean install is borked from the get-go, maybe try different distros. Since Framework supports Fedora, I'm surprised that anything would go wrong.

I don't know if Framework offers any support or warranty, but you could check with them too.

Since you say the thing is working fine on Windows, there's almost certainly a bug or several. I'd say probably a driver in the kernel, but could be something else. Changing distro or kernel version does sometimes help with that sort of thing, mainly because another distro may have newer or older kernels and other software, and bugs get both introduced and fixed every release.

Freezing issues can have lots reasons, including buggy apps, RAM exhaustion due to memory leaks, bugs in the graphics drivers or graphics stack more generally, various blocking I/O things taking unexpectedly long due to network issues or faulty hardware or drivers.

If you want a chance to figure this out, you probably need to run things in the terminal, like installing software updates through the apt and snap (?) cli utilities. GUIs are notoriously shit at reporting unexpected errors, whereas all sorts of programs (including GUI apps if you start them in a terminal) do regularly print warnings and error messages to stderr, which will show up in a terminal. This is because it's easy for the programmers to do that with just single printf() (etc.) line.

For driver issues, looking at the kernel logs can sometimes show interesting things as well. I will say that, when looking at logs or terminal output, there often are warnings that are completely unrelated and/or harmless, and that's not necessarily obvious to the user.

If this is a software issue, framework imho shouldn't advertise their stuff being able to run Ubuntu if they cannot stay on top of issues that are happening in this configuration.