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”

    • Ignotum
      link
      610 months ago

      What if they have more than one pc? Are they supposed to buy a harddrive for each?

      Get yourself a NAS and use that for swap, much easier to share between devices!

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      110 months ago

      How do you get it to actually swap? I tried changing swapiness but it still hardly touches swap but maxes out ram and freezes.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        110 months ago

        To be frank, I don’t actually know. I’ve had one or two times where my ram was maxed out because I used too many VMs but I barely remember

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    3010 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

    • @squid_slime
      link
      910 months ago

      Same, what usually spikes yours to 100%?

      • @grue
        link
        English
        1310 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
          link
          210 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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            19 months ago

            I mean there is a kernel OOM killer and a systemd service that acts well before that. Do you not use systemd?

            • @PainInTheAES
              link
              19 months ago

              I do use systemd. I pretty much run stock EndeavorOS

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        5
        edit-2
        10 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
          link
          6
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          Tends to be mem leak in bad code for me

          • The Stoned Hacker
            link
            510 months ago

            Yeah i only get near 100% when I’m doing a lot of virtualization or running nyx for a long time since there’s a memory leak in there.

            • @squid_slime
              link
              010 months ago

              Wouldn’t of thought nyx would be unstable.

              • The Stoned Hacker
                link
                210 months ago

                Not unstable nor unreliable, just a bit buggy. Every so often you gotta do a quick qq to exit and wait up to 5 minutes for it to let go of the ram. On occasion I’ve had to terminate the process as it was doing something wacky.

        • Possibly linux
          link
          fedilink
          English
          210 months ago

          I have 16 GB and it feels like a lot. I run virtual machines and I still have leftovers

      • @darganon
        link
        210 months ago

        Manipulating gigantic log files can do it for me.

        • @squid_slime
          link
          110 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.

      • Possibly linux
        link
        fedilink
        English
        410 months ago

        Its not a dedicated file usually as you can setup a swap partition.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          19 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
            link
            fedilink
            English
            19 months ago

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

    • exu
      link
      fedilink
      English
      19 months ago

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

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2810 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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      510 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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        610 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).

  • @tomcatt360
    link
    English
    910 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.

  • @z00s
    link
    810 months ago

    That’s not a blue screen, that’s a boo screen

  • @evidences
    link
    210 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.

      • @evidences
        link
        110 months ago

        I’m still on windows on my dekstop, I have a handful of boxes running various forms of Linux but I’m mainly just here for the memes.

        • tubbadu
          link
          fedilink
          110 months ago

          Don’t let the differences divide us, let’s unite under the memes!

    • @[email protected]OP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      510 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.

  • @_Atlas_
    link
    210 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