this is the first time in many years of my GNU/Linux journey that I saw a BSOD. on my office machine BTW. personal machine has never crashed even once.
the crash was due to 100% RAM and swap usage.

image description:
a mobile-clicked photo of a laptop screen. the background is full black with a sad computer image in the middle. the text below it reads: “Oh no! something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. Please log out and try again.”
just below it is a small button with the text “log out”

  • SteveTech@programming.devEnglish
    28·
    9 months ago

    The cool part is, the kernel and most of the user space is still running fine, so there’s no restart required (although I would anyway), it’s just gnome is having issues.

    I’ve had dodgy hardware cause a kernel panic, which is much more equivalent to a Windows BSOD.

    • lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      I think I made it work too much. i’m running 23.10(non-LTS), hadn’t shut it down for weeks, and was hoarding close to 200 tabs. furthermore, I had 3-4 electron-based applications open.

      • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
        6·
        9 months ago

        That’s not a problem. Especially because modern tabs hibernate. Linux can go forever without restarting, to the point where there are multiple services cropping up that let you upgrade your kernel while it’s running, so you never have to reboot (mostly, in some edge cases it’s still recommended to reboot).

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
    291·
    9 months ago

    100% RAM is a huge pain on Linux. I have a widget in my taskbar that always shows my RAM usage so I can tell if I’m about to get doinked

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        9 months ago

        Up until yesterday I would’ve said “Firefox” (because I hoard tabs), but it turns the real answer was “Firefox running as a Snap.”

        (A failed update screwed up my Snap installation, which finally gave me the kick I needed to quit procrastinating and excise it from my system once and for all. I’m running Firefox installed via apt package from Mozilla’s PPA, and now – with the same number of tabs open – my system is hovering around 8 GB memory usage, when before it was constantly bouncing off the 32 GB redline.)

        • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
          2·
          9 months ago

          Firefox somewhat regularly crashes or freezes up my laptop (16Gb) due to memory usage and I’m running the default Arch package. I ended up installing a memory watchdog that kills processes when they start using too much. Although I do hoard tabs.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
        61·
        9 months ago

        Carelessly running too many programs and not having much RAM.

        When I get my Framework 16, I’ll either get 64 or 128GBs of RAM. It’s so cheap nowadays, the only thing stopping me from getting more is simply the increased time to go to sleep and wake up.

        • squid_slime@lemmy.world
          1·
          9 months ago

          You know your in for a good time when notepad give a warning before hand, ive run into this before filling my 32gb of ram.

        • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
          1·
          9 months ago

          Technically you can create a fixed size pagefile in your disk and mount it as swap workout repartitioning. But Linux doesn’t use swap much regardless of method.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            It only uses swap under memory pressure. You can configure your swappyness if you want it to be more aggressive

    • exu@feditown.comEnglish
      1·
      8 months ago

      There are automated memory killers that should avoid this. I’m using nohang, but systemd also has some module for this.

  • tomcatt360@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    9 months ago

    Oooh, this blokes found a beauty! I haven’t seen one of those since I used an Eee PC with Debian as my daily driver. It has a whopping 1, I repeat, ONE GIGAbyte of RAM.

  • _Atlas_@lemmy.world
    31·
    9 months ago

    I literary had this problem today!!! What I did to fix, and I’m not sure which one of these it is, but I ran all of these and I got it to work again

    sudo apt install --fix-broken

    sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

    sudo apt install --reinstall gnome

    sudo apt install --reinstall xorg

    sudo apt install --fix-missing

    sudo apt autoremove

    • lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      should I be honoured or concerned that i’m being compared to AI? I wanted it to be descriptive.
      also, facebook has been generating alt text using AI for years now. you can see the same on unsplash.

  • evidences@lemmy.world
    2·
    9 months ago

    My very first experience with installing Ubuntu was a complete failure because I just got constant kernal panics. This was 2007ish trying to install Ubuntu on a bondi blue iMac using CD I had ordered from Canonical.