Linux

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.

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.

This blows my mind, honestly. Since I moved to Linux about 8 years ago, I've had little to no issues. No force of nature can ever make me go back to Windows and it's constant crashing for no reason. I run PopOS on a PC, Fedora Workstation on my laptop, my wife is also in Fedora, kids too (Nobara), and everything works. Mind you, the only device that is "made for Linux" is my laptop.

Your experience is very out of the ordinary.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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").

Choosing Ubuntu over Fedora because of American ties is rich

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.

Like @[email protected] 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

You ever run a memtest?