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.
A quick google search shows that many people have issues with the Intel Integrated Graphics on this particular PC (including on Windows) and this seems to be the solution: https://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=17021&title=solution-for-intel-graphics-freezing-system
The main solution is Windows based but someone does offer a Linux route to the same solution, although a linked file that sounds like setting it up may be easier is missing. Essentially it looks like the chipset needs tweaking to throttle the GPU slightly to prevent the flaw triggering.
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.