Thinking and wondering out loud...

[DoYouKubuntu]

Since your S76 came with Pop!_os I was wondering if it ran on your S76 box OK?

No, it came with Ubuntu 20.04--which is what I chose when ordering it. If they offered Kubuntu--and, believe me, I've asked!--I'd pick that instead.

[DoYouKubuntu]

I don't know if anyone's interested, but here's an update:

Yesterday, as noted, I reinstalled...again...and crossed my fingers. As soon as I was logged in, I went through tons of system settings, and disabled many, many things, including cache and cookies. I disabled things that even remotely seemed likely to cause my inexplicable problem. Last night, I put the laptop to bed [closed its lid, which I have set to do nothing], leaving Konsole running a continuous ping test. This morning, nothing but a blank screen; the laptop was locked tighter than Ft Knox! Its backlit keyboard was nicely lit up blue, but that was it. However, since booting up it's been smooth sailing. So that's two whole days in a row that the blankety-blank connectivity problem hasn't happened.

I still haven't done much customization at all; I was about to install QtCurve a minute ago, in Synaptic, and then decided against it. I'm going to try to be patient and see how long this current state lasts, and I want to do that with as little 'extra' stuff as possible. As usual [now], I'm backing up $HOME every so often, so if I need to reinstall I can format /home [or not, depending on mood] without risking losing any of my data.

I'm afraid to say it, because it's way too soon to be sure, but I have a strong feeling that its caching is somehow involved. I guess we'll see!

[GreyGeek]

No, it came with Ubuntu 20.04--which is what I chose when ordering it. If they offered Kubuntu--and, believe me, I've asked!--I'd pick that instead.

I installed Pop!_os in a VM just to check it out. Meh. It was made for newbs and people fresh from Win10. I felt like my hands were tied while using it. Right mouse context menu is sorely lacking. So is customization ... and beauty.

One is presented with the Pop!_os wall paper. The word "Activities" in the upper left end of the "tool bar" (?) and some controls on the right end, which lead to sound, wifi, display and power settings. Clicking the word "Activities" causes a column of icons to be displayed on the left side of the screen, and square set of dots at the bottom. The icons show FireFox, Terminal, File Manager and System. Clicking the dots displays in the center of the screen icons for all the apps installed.

Nothing to write home about. My son was interested in installing it on his gazelle. Even though Kubuntu is giving him full control and capability he thought that perhaps Pop!_os might have something specific to his hardware. After sharing with him my VM experience he said "No thanks".
Now to delete it.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Based on your experience with Pop!_os, GG, I'm glad I neither picked it when ordering nor installed it later!

[GreyGeek]

So was my son!

[SpecialEd]

If I liked gnome I'd just install Ubuntu.

[DoYouKubuntu]

If I liked gnome I'd just install Ubuntu.

Yep, me too! But I don't, hence my current predicament.

And whatever happened to Unity? Wasn't GNOME replaced with Unity at some point as Ubuntu's DE? I don't stay up on such stuff as it generally doesn't apply to me, but I'm wondering if user-revolt caused the dumping of Unity in favor of old standby, GNOME.

[DoYouKubuntu]

So was my son!

I'll bet! I mean, why mess with perfection, right?

A minor update: last night, right before putting the laptop to bed, I adjusted its power/display settings. I wanted to test having the screen turn off and then verify that I could awaken it by touching a key. So I set it for 1 minute, the screen turned off as expected, I touched [ctrl], the screen came back on, and everything was good to go. Then I adjusted the minutes to what I actually wanted, and moved the laptop over to its nightly spot--where I can see it. I left its ping test running in Konsole--as I had when I tested it a moment earlier. The whole point of this was to NOT close the laptop, as that seems to have something to do with the nightly lockups; so instead of closing the lid, I was just going to let the screen go dark with the lid up. About 15 minutes later, I glanced over and realized that the screen hadn't turned off...as it should have 5 minutes earlier.

I grabbed its trackball and started poking around in settings, to see what I'd done to make this happen...but I hadn't done anything. All I'd done is what I said above: I changed the number of minutes. From that point on, nothing related to the screen's power worked. For example, "Screen brightness" did not/does not respond to adjustments. "Dim screen" and "Screen energy saving" no longer work after their respective minutes.

Since the screen wouldn't go dark, I went ahead and closed the lid. This morning...locked up tighter than Ft Knox yet again! But, as with the previous two days, once it's up and running it's basically working great. Other than the new power/display issue...

So far I have a lot of things working that were giving me problems before, such as KDE Connect, and accessing my other computers over the network. I can read/write/delete on my other computers, and I can send/receive files and pings with KDE C. So guess what I'm going to do? And risk messing everything up? Install Samba! I need to in order to access this computer from my phone and my other computers. That's a critically important issue for me, so I'm going to HAVE TO plunge in and do it at some point. Wish me luck!

[GreyGeek]

At this point I'm suspecting that your machine was put together early Monday morning or late Friday and it is a lemon.

My first test would be to boot from a confirmed good USB stick and run your machine in the Live mode for the day, doing everything you'd normally do (if possible) including sleeping the display a/o the machine, etc. If it works OK from the USB stick then it may not be a hardware problem. Granted, there are some things you can't test running a USB stick (especially the display driver) but the Live version crashes as well then ...

https://support.system76.com/articles/hardware-failure/

[GreyGeek]

I found a site that tracked the freezing issue in Ubuntu from 18.04 to 20.04 Here are the "solutions" posted. They worked for some and not for others.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...x/+bug/1798961

#42

Had same frozen display problem with Ubuntu, most times coincident with a very busy video adapter (MVP, Gimp, GMaps..)
Hardware: Laptop Acer Aspire 5735Z
Ubuntu 18.10
Linux 4.18.0-13-generic

Workaround:
sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
...add
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "AccelMethod" "sna"
Option "TearFree" "true"
Option "DRI" "3"
EndSection

Result: Still ok after several hours and tasks.

#58

I've had these freeze issues for a while, and I've been following this thread for a while (comment #42 helped, though I still have occasional freezes).

Googled "Fedora random freeze" today and found this: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Commo..._hang_randomly

Apparently an issue in Ubuntu also: https://www.phoronix.com/forums/foru...82#post1020982

And the timing of these bugreports/comments coincides with when these freezes started affecting me...

Long story short, we can try adding `ahci.mobile_lpm_policy=1` or `ahci.mobile_lpm_policy=0` to the kernel options in grub. Supposedly confirmed to help Lenovo G50-80, X250 and T450s. We have a G40-80 and T470s affected on this thread, and mine's a Lenovo G500s (similar to G50-80). Maybe it'll help? (praying that it helps)

It's possible that these freezes have multiple causes, and won't be completely fixed even if the workaround helps at all.

#77

I also experienced this problem, but after increasing swap memory from 2GB to 8GB, I didn't reproduce the issue for 1 month straight.

#83

UPDATE: freezes stopped occuring since I uninstalled xserver-xorg-video-intel.

[DoYouKubuntu]

At this point I'm suspecting that your machine was put together early Monday morning or late Friday and it is a lemon.

Ha ha! That would explain a lot!

My first test would be to boot from a confirmed good USB stick and run your machine in the Live mode for the day, doing everything you'd normally do (if possible) including sleeping the display a/o the machine, etc. If it works OK from the USB stick then it may not be a hardware problem. Granted, there are some things you can't test running a USB stick (especially the display driver) but the Live version crashes as well then

Right now--knock on wood--everything's going really well.

I have not yet installed Samba, as I got sidetracked doing other things; I now have root logins enabled, and the login screen isn't pre-filled with any user's name. I've also confirmed that despite System Settings not responding to things like adjusting the screen's brightness, hardware works, so I can use the [F8] and [F9] function keys to adjust that. I'm slowly adding things in, making sure I have current backups before making any changes, and it's slowly but surely getting to where I want it.

Now, don't anyone hold me to this! I'm not ready to proclaim success, just that things are going very smoothly right now, and this one-at-a-time method of adding/tweaking things seems to be working. Sure, it's a bit cumbersome, but it beats the hell out of bricking the laptop and having to start over again!

https://support.system76.com/articles/hardware-failure/

I've bookmarked it...just in case...

[dequire]

And whatever happened to Unity? Wasn't GNOME replaced with Unity at some point as Ubuntu's DE? I don't stay up on such stuff as it generally doesn't apply to me, but I'm wondering if user-revolt caused the dumping of Unity in favor of old standby, GNOME.

It's still around
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubunt...ix-20-04/15968
https://ubuntuunity.org/

[DoYouKubuntu]

Here's one for the books. Remember how I said in my OP that I thought user error could be responsible for some of my problems? Yep!

I was just playing around with my system tray icons [that's covered elsewhere], and as I hovered over the tray icon for KDE Connect, something jumped out at me. KDEC was suppressing a display function, I think it said screensaver [which I don't use], but anyway I went to KDEC's settings [on the computer] and unchecked 'inhibit screensaver.' Then I went to System Settings and found that--once again--its controls for things like 'dim screen' were working! Okay...

I distinctly remember [as noted above] that I hadn't adjusted anything but the minutes to wait for the screen to shut off, that night when this 'problem' came up. But, whatever! It's fixed now.

[GreyGeek]

Don't you just love KDEConnect!
I get my Samsung text messaged displayed on my plasma desktop screen as a popups and I can respond to them from KDEConnect. The message I send is appended to the list on my phone.

[DoYouKubuntu]

Yes, I do love KDE Connect!

It works like a charm on my new laptop, where it was installed by default when I installed Kubuntu; on my old laptop, it was kind of touch-and-go as far as its reliability. Oddly, though, one thing that worked without issue on the old one was sharing clipboard contents. On the new laptop, that's not working...and with the PLETHORA of other issues, I haven't even begun to think about why not! All in due time. But, yes, its features are really cool and it's nice to have.