My laptop seems very finicky with linux and enjoys periodically freezing. Some distributions are more stable than others and I'd like to keep testing other distributions without reinstalling/ downloading/transferring all my apps and steam games constantly.
What I would like to achieve is to have my small handful of flatpak apps and flatpak steam games on a separate partition to quickly access while I test and troubleshoot issues.
Is that possible to do with flatpaks?
pages like this also suggest things like updating the BIOS and the graphics card firmware with some AMD tool. And I've read several times you should try the kernel parameter
amdgpu.runpm=0Make sure to do all of that first. And observe if the freezes happen in certain circumstances. Maybe you can deduct something from that. Maybe it happens while gaming (GPU). Or when under load. Or if you move it around (loose connection), or when hot or after a certain time even if idle. Disable power management and see if that helps. Should be less effort than installing 5 operating systems. (If the crash isn't super rare) And try using the magic SysReq keys to force linux to sync and reboot to see if the kernel is still alive somehow.
Fortunately I updated my BIOS from windows before switching to Linux and as of recently, I still have the latest version.
I added
amdgpu.runpm=0and that did increase stability considerably. My system froze up way less often which was great.I also found that adding
processor.max_cstate=1has made my system even more stable and I haven't had a freeze up in days now. This page gives a nice run down of what it does.I wouldn't be surprised if there is a freeze up in the future but overall my system has been a lot more stable making everything far more enjoyable.
Awesome. Let's hope the eventually fix the remaining hiccups. Maybe it's really the power management if those kernel parameters did it.