I am relatively new to linux and would like to learn how to troubleshoot things like this. I’m not sure whether the title is indeed correct, but I’ve had it happen twice now that I was on discord with friends, and suddenly my whole system freezes. When I restart, the official discord client says it has an update.

Has anyone else have this happen? How do I best look for the actual cause? Or at least some error message I can google?

I am on vanilla arch, running plasma on wayland, and I’ve got the AUR enabled using yay. Discord is installed from the arch extra repo though.

  • @[email protected]English
    1•32 minutes ago

    like others have said; the logs are your friends here; but you can also help narrow it down. the next time it happens, see if you can confirm how your system has frozen by doing these things:

    if it’s well and truly frozen, nothing will happen when you tap the caps lock key; as in your key led won’t light up or you don’t get any response at all.

    if it does light up; then it might be your xwindows environment and you might be able to switch to a virtual terminal. most distributions have setup alt+ctrl+f1 through f7 to let you switch to one of them and some distros have setup alt+ctrl+backspace to restart your xwindows. if you’re in this situation, then it’s a safe bet that an application is causing your problem and you can narrow your focus on the logs there.

  • @[email protected]
    1•60 minutes ago

    try having a look at the logs from the end of previous boot, I think it’s journalctl -eb -1.

    journalctl is afaik systemd’s log management thingy, and any software issue should be able to be found there.

    if it’s a hardware/driver issue it might be a bit harder to troubleshoot though, what hardware (cpu/motherboard mainly) are you using?

  • @just_another_person
    2•1 hour ago

    Honestly, this just happens with Electron apps. Just nuke everything and reinstall. Don’t forget the XDG directories.