This issue is a long time coming. I got a mini pc (Asrock Deskmini h110, i5-6400, 16gb) that I have used for a long time with Kubuntu/Kde Neon, and most of its life, it worked great. Some years ago, it started freezing, especially at Graphic intensive workload, so I thought some hardware issue and converted it into a NAS and it worked absolutely fine as well for a couple of years there too. Recently my wife needed a Windows PC to do some work, and since I had upgraded my NAS, I repurposed the same PC and installed Windows on it, and it worked absolutely fine for her too. Then I decided to check some Graphics intensive workload, like 3d benchmarking stuff, and it didn’t freeze once. I was delighted, and thought maybe I didn’t investigated the issue the first time, and the PC was fine all along. So I reinstalled Debian 13, and lo behold, the issue came back. I found out while I was using IKEA’s 3d kitchen planner. So I replaced distros, and it froze on Ubuntu and CachyOS as well. I tried switching between Wayland and X11, switched browsers, but PC freezes seconds logging into IKEA’s kitchen planner (as soon as 3d graphics are loaded). I reinstalled windows, and my wife has been designing a kitchen in IKEA’s 3d kitchen planner for over an hour now, and it hasn’t frozen once. What’s going on? How do I even investigate this?
I have reinstalled Linux and had sudo dmesg -w running, but no logs are captured before it’s frozen. I have reproduced the issue multiple times now on Linux, and not once it froze on Windows. I have also done memtests, and tried multiple disks both nvme and sata. Also have tried multiple browsers with apt and flatpaks. I really need Lemmy’s collective intelligence to help me here.
Well you sent me down a rabbit hole and for a while I thought it was definitely the issue. I found a script that does what the suggested solution in the link says, and I adjusted iccmax values for GPU, but it doesn’t matter what parameters I adjusted, it kept freezing. I tried BIOS firmware downgrade and updates, changed undervolt parameters and so many other stuff, but didn’t help. In fact it kept freezing without going into graphic intensive work, so I tried reinstalling different distro with different DE, yet all of them froze so much much that I gave up. Reinstalled Windows and it hasn’t freeze once. It’s hard to admit as a Linux evangelist but windows works for some bloody reason where Linux simply fails.
Why would that be hard to admit? This is a bug in a specific hardware that has a crappy driver for Linux, Intel doesn’t care about Linux, if Linux was 90% of the market instead of 2% I assure you this bug wouldn’t exist.
Because I have been asking my wife to switch to Linux for sometime and one time where she finally agrees, this is what happens. Your reasons are valid but even if I could explain all that to her, she already got one of the worst impressions about Linux with this fiasco. I don’t know how to explain this but this small little thing, this bug, not only has kinda killed my credibility as a tech person in my house, it has also killed the hope of moving away from big corporations towards self hosted services.