Cinnamon freezes in the middle of using firefox

[lourduradjou]

Distribution

Mint 22.3

Package version

6.6.7

Graphics hardware in use

GeForce GTX 1650 Mobile / Max-Q

Frequency

Quite often

Bug description

Hi team, atleast once or twise a day this happens, while i am simply watching youtube the screen just freezes and i can't even do anything other than switch off my laptop to open it already. This happens very often , just watching one single youtube video i feel won't put a pressure to my laptop then .

I am using amd ryzen 5000 series with nvidia graphics card.

I couldn't find the exact issue, so i am raising one, also i can't find this in forums, youtube. All the contents were too old and not releveant in solving my issue. Anyone else facing this issue?

Steps to reproduce

Sorry it just happens at the time it wants, like i can't even take video or screenshots sadly

Expected behavior

Nothing should freeze to my opinion, cause if this happens while i do some presentation or important things then what is the purpose of having this, i would have simply gone with windows.

Additional information

No response

[giafitano-ux]

"I had a similar freeze issue on a Lenovo laptop with NVIDIA graphics. Updating the NVIDIA drivers fixed it for me. Worth trying before anything else."

[Fjodor42]

I don't know if it's the same I have seen, but whatever that was, it was remedied by, in Firefox, going to Settings -> General -> Performance, and:

1. Deselect "Use recommended performance settings"
2. Deselect "Use hardware acceleration when available"

I don't know exactly where the problem lies, i.e. whether the it is with Firefox, with Cinnamon, with Nvidia, or with how two or more of them interact (or counteract, as it seems), but I suspect that latter.

I have absolutely no idea as to how to even begin to try to debug it, though, and this comment should not be seen as a solution, but as a temporary workaround.

[lourduradjou]

I don't know if it's the same I have seen, but whatever that was, it was remedied by, in Firefox, going to Settings -> General -> Performance, and:

1. Deselect "Use recommended performance settings"
2. Deselect "Use hardware acceleration when available"

I don't know exactly where the problem lies, i.e. whether the it is with Firefox, with Cinnamon, with Nvidia, or with how two or more of them interact (or counteract, as it seems), but I suspect that latter.

I have absolutely no idea as to how to even begin to try to debug it, though, and this comment should not be seen as a solution, but as a temporary workaround.

I tried this now I'll update after some days

[lourduradjou]

"I had a similar freeze issue on a Lenovo laptop with NVIDIA graphics. Updating the NVIDIA drivers fixed it for me. Worth trying before anything else."

I did this but it was not working

[giafitano-ux]

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Since that didn't work for you, the hardware acceleration workaround points to a GPU/driver interaction problem — likely a conflict between the NVIDIA driver and the compositor during video decode.

Since the freeze requires a hard reboot, normal logs get cut off. To capture what's happening, first enable persistent logging so logs survive a hard reboot:

sudo mkdir -p /var/log/journal
sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

After your next freeze and reboot, check the previous boot's logs:

sudo journalctl -b -1 | tail -100

Also check the Xorg log from the previous session:

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

Post the output here and it should give us enough to identify whether it's a driver crash, compositor issue, or something else.

In the meantime, the hardware acceleration workaround should keep you stable:

1. Settings → General → Performance
2. Deselect "Use recommended performance settings"
3. Deselect "Use hardware acceleration when available"

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