[ale] Suggestion for a Good Linux/Desktop

[David Jackson]

My first choice is usually to throw more memory at it.  Most of my
desktop machines have about 32G of ram these days.  The usual memory
culprit is Chrome.  But even then, it's only chrome that freezes.  If my
cursor happened to be over chrome or somehow isn't free, I'll CTL-ALT-F2 to
get to a TTY, run an htop, and of course, it's always some chrome page that
has run amok with a memory leak or whatever.  So in that case I just
killall chrome from the TTY, and then I can CTL-ALT back to the desktop and
restart chrome a little more thoughtfully.  I guess that's my compromise
for now.  I like the dev-tools chrome offers, and I have just tolerated the
other goofiness of chrome in order to hang onto those dev-tools.

I use Chrome for lots and lots of stuff.  I've become entirely too
dependent on it.  So many critical daily services are online, a browser is
just the best way to use them, I guess.

When your desktop freezes, have you tried getting to a TTY?  Or ssh-ing
into the box from another machine?  Just to see what's happening while it's
still happening?  Chrome is *supposed* to manage its own memory, but if you
can find the offending pages or apps through the Chrome task-manager (or
whatever browser you're using), you can perhaps find out which web apps are
leaking into your memory, if indeed that is the problem.


On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 3:25 PM Bob via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

>
> Hi David,
>
> I agree.
>
> If mint freezes, I usually have too many applications open along with
> too many tabs open in my browswer, and there is hardly any available
> memory.
>
> --Bob
>
> On 2020-10-20 2:44 p.m., David Jackson via Ale wrote:
> > Seems to me you've gotten some really good recommendations here.  But
> Mint
> > and Cinnamon are usually very stable.  Sometimes I've seen some
> flickering
> > in Cinnamon, which I attribute to some recent experiments in the source
> > tree, but usually the production branch is very stable.  And Mint runs an
> > LTS kernel on an LTS version of Ubuntu, so it's about as stable as it
> > gets.  That combo should be working, so the freeze-crash problem seems
> > unusual to me.  It seems to me the problem might have nothing to do with
> > your choice of distro/desktop.  Mate is a smaller and less complicated
> > desktop.  But still...  Have you checked some logs to find out what else
> is
> > happening leading up to your freeze-crash incidents?
> >
> >
> > On Sun, Oct 18, 2020 at 7:42 AM Contact VPV via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
> >
> >> All,
> >>
> >> I have been using Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop for the past few
> years
> >> as my daily driver. I am able to get most of the things. But there are a
> >> few times the Cinnamon Desktop just freezes and crashes while I am in
> the
> >> middle of some work. This kind of throws me off. I have tried most of
> the
> >> tricks on the LM forums and nothing leads me to a proper solution.
> >>
> >> Now that, I am thinking of switching to some simple and clean desktop
> that
> >> does not crash on me. I had to use Mac for my work, so I will be
> switching
> >> between my Mac and Linux on a daily basis.  I had customized my
> Cinnamon to
> >> look and behave like Mac and was successful to an extent that I could
> >> manage.
> >>
> >> Is there a recommendation for a distro/desktop that would help me?
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