On Monday the 5th I did a fresh, clean install of Ubuntu 20.04.1 on a fairly old computer, but one that has worked fine for me since 2011. It's an Acer Aspire AX3400-U4032, AMD Athlon II X4 645 Quad Core with NVIDIA GeoForce 9200 [edit: the sticker on the side of the box says 9200, Ubuntu reports 8200] (though I've learned the hard way to NOT use the NVIDIA drivers, I'm using whatever ships with Ubuntu). Over the years I've swapped out the HD for an SSD (which SMART says is fine) and upgraded it to 8 gigs of RAM. I selected zfs as the filesystem when I installed. Monitor is connected via HDMI and HDMI/keyboard/mouse are run through a KVM that I've been using for some time now without issues.
Ever since then it's given to random desktop freezes...but I specifically say "desktop" because it's clear that the system is not frozen. Every single time it happens I can log in via SSH from another computer, check out top and everything looks fine. Login happens immediately, I can do commandline stuff all day long without a problem. Usually I wind up rebooting via sudo reboot now over SSH after a while because I always forget about REISUB (though I will try to remember that next time!). It can take a while for the reboot to happen, though. That suggests to me that something is getting cleaned up (?) but I don't really know.
Maybe I don't know what to look for, but I haven't found anything useful in syslog. In fact, I've even run tail -f syslog via SSH on another box to see if something jumps out right at the moment it locks up, but so far it hasn't done me any good.
I'm about 99% certain that the freezes always happen when I click the mouse. Obviously not EVERY time I click the mouse, but it seems like it's a mouse click (probably left) that triggers it. I was using a very, very old Logitech trackball but yesterday switched to a standard HP optical mouse just in case there was some hardware issue with the trackball. Didn't help.
It has never, not even once, frozen when I'm not actually sitting in front of it and using it. It will stay up all day and all night just fine doing its thing...until I actually sit down in front of it and try to, you know, use it. It may stay OK for 15 minutes, maybe for 5. Doesn't seem to matter what software I'm using at the time, I've had freezes when I'm browsing via Firefox, editing with Atom or using LibreOffice. I'm running W7 in a VirtualBox guest, but leaving that off doesn't seem to help. I try to close anything I'm not actively using, just in case that's causing some conflict, but it hasn't helped.
One other possibly useful bit of information is that I MUST use Wayland. If I log on to Ubuntu without Wayland, a lockup is absolutely 100% guaranteed the instant I try to open a LibreOffice document.
I had very occasionally seen something similar in the past under 18.04, but the freezes only lasted a few seconds and, when I would SSH in and check top I'd see some process or other using 100% and Whoopsie would also be running. I hadn't experienced that in some time and assume some update fixed whatever was going on. This seems to be different in that nothing looks out of the ordinary in top and, as far as I can tell, it never recovers on its own. It's as if the computer itself is still working just fine under the hood, but the video has just decided to give up.
The computer went from being incredibly reliable under 18.04 to very, very close to non-usable under 20.04.1 (I'm typing this on a separate Windows 7 box to be sure that I can actually finish it and post it).
I'm tempted to unplug the HDMI and see if the problem persists while using the VGA output, though I haven't done that yet. Obviously I'm not in any hurry to degrade the display quality if I don't have to.
It's maddening because the fact that the overall computer isn't crashing suggests to me that it's not a motherboard or RAM or other hardware issue (unless it's the integrated graphics). I suppose I could try to disable onboard graphics and get a separate card, but I had a HORRIBLE past experience where doing that on another computer killed it for good, so I consider that an absolute last resort, if even that.
Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Am I just a bad person for hanging on to an old computer?
Update: After the last lockup while playing around in the Windows 7 guest in VirtualBox, I remembered that it's the Pro version of W7 which means I can log in via RDP. When I did so, the Windows session behaved 100% normally. The screen remained completely frozen on the monitor connected to the Ubuntu box, but was just fine via RDP. Seems like a smoking gun in terms of narrowing it down to graphics.
