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I recently switched my Acer laptop to Ubuntu 18.04 for a web dev class I'm taking and I'm having a problem where it keeps freezing and becoming entirely unresponsive. This doesn't seem to be linked to any application in particular. I saw a few older posts describing the same problem but in previous versions of Ubuntu and also for people running dual boot systems, neither of these is the case for me. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

alberbecois
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  • Go back to the old posts. The old posts are still valid for recent single boot systems that keep freezing. – karel May 16 '18 at 00:36
  • Did you use top or System Monitor to make certain there aren't any processes using up a lot of resources? Also, how many browser tabs do you typically keep open at a time? – Hee Jin May 16 '18 at 00:38
  • I've just applied the fix proposed at this post:

    https://askubuntu.com/questions/761706/ubuntu-15-10-and-16-04-keep-freezing-randomly?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=google_rich_qa&utm_campaign=google_rich_qa

    I'll see if that fixes it. Thanks for the suggestion.

    Regarding resources, I don't think that's the problem. I only ever had at most two three tabs open since I've been mainly working on course work involving a virtual machine and sublime text. I thought it might have been due to the vm, but the last time it happened I only had FB opened and hadn't even touched the vm.

     – alberbecois May 16 '18 at 00:58

5 Answers5

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I was facing the same issue. I have Nvidia GTX 750 Ti graphics card. I suspected it is because of the missing drivers.

  1. Go to Software & Updates. Go to additional drivers tab and wait for the options to load.
  2. Chose Nvidia driver meta-package from nvidia-driver-304. Click apply changes and wait for the driver to install.
  3. You can also increase you swap space.

In Ubuntu 18.04 you can use the following steps to change swap Turn off all swap processes

sudo swapoff -a

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=8

if = input file of = output file bs = block size count = multiplier of blocks

sudo mkswap /swapfile

sudo swapon /swapfile

grep SwapTotal /proc/meminfo

Then finally please turn off Hardware accelaration in Mozilla and Chrome. Sometimes these browsers eat up too much memory and hence crash.

In chrome, go to chrome settings at chrome://settings then go to Advanced. Deselect "use hardware acceleration when available". Also go to chrome flags at chrome://flags and disable CPU Rasterization. Alternatively you can use google-chrome --disable-gpu to start chrome.

In Mozilla, go to Preferences, here go to Performance section. Deselect "Use recommended performace settings". Also deselect "Use hardware accelaration when available" and finally limit the content to 2.

Please restart and hopefully you are good to go.

Abhay Shiro
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Finally I fixed this. For me, I disabled the automatic login feature. If you can, navigate to Settings > Details > Users and turn off Automatic Login. You will have to click "Unlock" on the top right to change the setting.

If you are unable to get to this setting, I would try reinstalling Ubuntu while making sure to leave this option turned off.

Joe Kuczek
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I had the same problem on an HP 6565B. I solved it by installing, UKuu kernel update utility. I upgraded to the mainline kernel 4.19. Not only is the computer faster it's more responsive. It's a lot fast by far! Unleash Ubuntu 18.04 and update the kernel. If you install a new new Linux kernel on your Ubuntu machine and it does not work properly, a piece of hardware fails, or any other issues arise you can easily boot in to an older kernel from the GRUB screen then, when back up, use Ukuu to remove the mainline kernel.

Michael Cantrell
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I answered a similar question here https://askubuntu.com/a/1188594/987024 but I think this might have been more related question to answer. In short, updating Ubuntu broke my Nvidia driver installation. I reinstalled it and now it looks OK.

entropy
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I've faced the same problem that Ubuntu 18.04 freezes from time to time. Ubuntu 18.04 completely froze while I was coding, then sometime later the same happened when I watched a movie it was a problem that was not related with the GPU and had random occurrence. I've found this solution after hours of searching. Just run this command and restart your computer. 

sudo apt install --install-recommends linux-generic-hwe-18.04 xserver-xorg-hwe-18.04

After restarting, verify that the 5.0.0.x generic was installed:

uname -a

That'll work fine.

shahriarpshuvo
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