Linux

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.

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).

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.

Running a framework 16 with FedoraKDE and before that a 4gb ram 2015 toshiba satellite (in 2024) running Fedora (regular Gnome) and haven't had one of these issues. Most issues I have had were caused by me, every now and again I run into a regular old bug in something and half the time that gets fixed pretty quick.

I wish I could help, but we just have opposite experiences unfortunately. That said, because of this I don't think it's "linux," or I'd likely have at least similar experiences.

OH for a while I did have a bug where VLC would stutter playing video and nobody had a fix, so I uninstalled/reinstalled VLC and it works now. Idk, I've had shit like that happen on windows too though, it's basically the software version of power cycling hardware when it acts up.

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

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 with.

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.

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

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

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.)

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

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.

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

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.

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.