Crashing

[Snowhog]

Had to hard power off and reboot

That should always be the LAST resort. Instead, should you experience this again, use the MAGIC KEY SEQUENCE to safely shutdown and reboot. Press and hold Alt and PrtSc keys, then press/release the keys R,E,I,S,U,B

[JennyLucas]

Update: Running Handbrake in the VM seems to have solved my issue. Thanks for the assist everyone. I ddi not try the Flatpak solution that was proposed.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Instead of using a VM you could also try using Handbrake as the official Flatpak - see How to enable Flatpak in Kubuntu 24.04 LTS.

[JennyLucas]

Seems there are 2 kinds of crashes: 1 where everything locks up and another where some apps continue and others don't. I have a feeling that the issue is Handbrake (installed originally with Discover). I have since uninstalled Handbrake and NOT re-installed it. (I have installed it in a virtual machine). So, I am running makemkv on the host and Handbrake in the VM. It's only been a day, but so far there has been no issue. I'll update again in a couple of days.

[Schwarzer Kater]

You might try going through logs and maybe finding out what is killing your network. […]

Did you do that already?

Can you still hit [Alt] [Space] to open KRunner when a crash occurs?
You can also view several previous log files or have a "live" output when you use your computer with an open Konsole terminal emulator and e.g. sudo journalctl -f .

[JennyLucas]

Update. Crashed again yesterday. Jellyfin was playing a movie and it continued. Mouse disappeared and alt-tab did not switch apps. Could not open the main menu. Tried CRTL-Alt-F3 but it did not do anything. Had to hard power off and reboot.

[oshunluvr]

On my desktop's 23.10, it's Ctrl-Alt-F2 for the GUI. Ctrl-Alt-F1 gets the text console with the boot messages.

I'm on KDEneon which might explain the difference.

[Schwarzer Kater]

On my desktop's 23.10, it's Ctrl-Alt-F2 for the GUI. Ctrl-Alt-F1 gets the text console with the boot messages.

Still the same for Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. This can differ from distribution to distribution, though.

[jlittle]

CRTL-Alt-F1 will get you back to the GUI.

On my desktop's 23.10, it's Ctrl-Alt-F2 for the GUI. Ctrl-Alt-F1 gets the text console with the boot messages.

[JennyLucas]

Thanks oshunluvr. I will try those out!

[oshunluvr]

You might try going through logs and maybe finding out what is killing your network. Seems plausible that your system is trying to restore the connection and bogging down the desktop. The next time this happens, try CRTL-Alt-F3 and entering this: "sudo dmesg". Look for errors in the output

From terminal mode you can also restart SDDM and log in again without rebooting: "sudo systemctl restart sddm"

CRTL-Alt-F1 will get you back to the GUI.

[JennyLucas]

I did a clean install of 24.04 (so no other OS). I have installed a few things (makemkv, handbrake, jellyfin, vmware workstation, external blu-ray drive but otherwise pretty stock). Seems like every couple of days I need to do a power cycle to get my desktop back. Symptoms: Network stops (hard cable connection), some apps that were open will stop working (if I have monitor open and try to kill the app, nothing happens, apps that lock up are Dolphin, handbrake, firefox, others), Dolphin closes on its own. Try to restart the OS but the reset button will not respond. Thus, I have to force the power off and then back on. Tried: Sleep settings all disabled, no hybernation, increased size of swap file, disabled password to login, disabled lock screen, screen blank after 15 minutes. Consider myself a noob to kubuntu but lots of experience with computers (mostly Windows).