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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I have been having such a difficult time getting a 2018 Dell Latitude 7930 to run any Linux distro stably. Maybe there is something obvious I am missing or maybe it really is dying hardware that's the root cause of the issue.

The silly thing is I had a stable install of openSUSE Tumbleweed running for a few months but because I made some poor choices on disk partition when I installed it I was eventually backed into a corner where I had to wipe the SSD and install from scratch.

I since then have tried Tumbleweed again as well as Ubuntu, Mint, and finally Manjaro to no avail. The Debian based distros completely freeze at some point, either immediately upon login and loading the desktop or when running apt update. Tumbleweed gets a kernel panic within an hour or so, even though I changed kernel options to a previous known-good config. Now after quite a frustrating time installing Manjaro it freezes within an hour as well and the diagnostic light code indicates a CPU issue.

Strangely enough none of these issues are apparent when running from a LiveUSB, but occur on two different M.2 SATA SSDs with proper installs.

At this point I don't really care which distro I use, as long as it doesn't crash constantly. Does anyone have any suggestions on other things I can try?

Edit: seems to be solved with the kernel options I already mentioned. For whatever reason it didn't work for the Tumbleweed reinstall but Manjaro has run for a couple days without crashing.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics#Crash/freeze_on_low_power_Intel_CPUs

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[-] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

I would start by running a full memtest scan. Faulty RAM can manifest itself as apparently random freezes or application crashes.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That was my first thought, sounds like a hardware issue, either maybe overheating? Faulty ram or ssd issues, etc

Been using Ubuntu on my Dell Latitude 7490 for years with no issues

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Of course I should have done that too. Running one now, I'll let it go for a few hours and see what happens.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Not sure you saw my edit, but I've been using a Dell Latitude 7490 for years and its been perfectly fine, so the issues you're experiencing aren't normal. Something is definitely up with your specific laptop. Just mentioning to help you narrow down issues.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

If it finds bad areas take a picture. You can tell the kernel which are the bad addresses so it can avoid them.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

How did that go?

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Install a windows first just to launch the Dell Command Update app (you'll have to download it from the Dell website) and use it to update the BIOS and Intel firmwares.

These laptops even run badly on win10 until you update everything.

Then install your chosen distro. I bet there will be fewer problems then.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

A software approach to a hardware problem is an exercise in futility.

Test your memory with Memtest86

Test your disks too. badblocks is a Linux utility. I like the Victoria and HDDScan Windows programs because they’re less pass/fail in their reporting - you can see that a disk is degraded even if all of the sectors technically respond.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Memory is fine. I ran a couple disk checks as well and it's also fine. I was also using two SSDs during the process with no difference in the problems experiences.

this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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