[Discuss] ugly problem

[slitt at troubleshooters.com (Steve Litt)]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 12:35:00 -0400
dan moylan <jdm at moylan.us> wrote:

> since yesterday i have been having irregular freezeups on my
> computer.  for instance, today i was reading the nytimes via
> chrome, and suddenly the mouse ceased to function, nor would
> the touchpad on my keyboard.  the screen content remained
> unchanged, the mouse pointer visible but stationary.
> neither ctl-alt-del nor ctl-alt-f2 had any effect.  i
> attempted to ssh in from another computer and got "no route
> to host", nor could i ping.  a hard reset restores apparent
> normalcy -- at least for a while.  times vary.  i have yet
> to experience a freeze w/o the browser running (which of
> course is seldom the case).
> 
> the computer is an intel nuc-10 running fc27.
> 
> any suggestions would be appreciated.

Hi Dan,

By definition you have an intermittent problem here. Although it's
always nice to find the exact root cause, time constraints might not
permit that. In that case, you might do prophylactic things to possibly
lessen the chance of it happening.

If you're using the Chrome (or for that matter Chromium) browser,
you're using a pig. Not as piggy as Firefox, but piggy enough to add
instability to your system. Consider switching to Surf, vimb, Midori,
or qupzilla.

The fact that you're using Fedora makes me suspect that you're not
using a lightweight window manager. I don't think Fedora offers
lightweights, but you can build them yourself. I've used both LXDE and
Openbox, and recommend them highly. I also highly recommend IceWM,
except that its menu system is so worthless that you'll need to provide
an additional menu system (dmenu comes to mind). At this time in
history, Xfce is NOT a lightweight, and in the past I've had it get
intermittent on me.

My guess would be that with a lighter weight browser and a lightweight
window manager or desktop environment (wm/de), there's a 50% chance of
your eliminating this symptom or relegating it to "too rare to care"
status.

SteveT
 
Steve Litt
Author: The Key to Everyday Excellence
http://www.troubleshooters.com/key
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stevelitt