What do I do, when my PC freezes?

Windows has ctrl+alt+del, does Linux Mint has something comparable? The only thing I know about is REISUB, but that borked my PC, so I am hesitant to use that again.

Are there any remaining alternatives to waiting and/or using the power button?

Edit: Thank you all for your insights and possible fixes. Crashes usually happened when I was running (cpu/ram?) heavy workload. Increasing swap space was not even on my radar, so I did that now. :) Hopefully Mint will run more stable now.

  • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Sometimes the freeze might be in the display manager. Eg xorg or your wayland compositor has crashed.

    In that case, you can use keyboard controls to change tty and fall back to a text interface. I think it’s ctrl + alt + $number, where $number will correspond to the tty you want. Most graphical sessions launch on tty2, so you would use crtl + alt + 1 to switch to tty1.

    From there you can log in and use terminal commands to launch a new gui session, or to try and debug what went wrong. Generally, I’ve only had freezing issues on Linux when my GPU is dying. There was also a period where my work computer didn’t have enough swap space. It would freeze whenever I tried to compile code during a video call.

    • abcdqfr@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      My display manager keeps hanging during wallpaper engine development, never does respond to Ctrl+Alt+F2. Only REISUB seems to be able to save me. Never had anything borked or out of place after reboot. Any ideas? That still sound like the display driver crashing? Haven’t done much diagnosing since I’d have to cludge through troubleshooting over SSH on Android at random :\

      • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        3 months ago

        Could be a GPU driver bug. I get them occasionally with amdgpu. In this case only hard reset works (no it’s not a hardware problem, Windows never freezes like that).

        BTW you can get logs of the pervious boot using journalctl -b -1 command. Useful for debugging freezes like this.

      • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        have you tried other ttys? there could be something running on 2.

    • SpikesOtherDog@ani.social
      0·
      3 months ago

      Some desktop environments will allow Ctrl Alt Backspace to restart the environment. It’s the Linux equivalent of killing Windows Explorer, and sometime just as sketchy.

    • KokusnussRitter@discuss.tchncs.deOP
      0·
      3 months ago

      There was also a period where my work computer didn’t have enough swap space.

      Since I am still quite new to Linux, is swap space referring to swap RAM?

      • lime!@feddit.nuEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        swap space is a dedicated place on your hard drive that the OS throws stuff to when there isn’t enough ram for everything. this is called swapping. since the hard drive is involved, swapping can slow things down a lot. if you get close to filling both ram and swap space, the machine starts shedding load by killing programs.

    • jabathekek@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      3 months ago

      One time I accidentally went into tty and had no idea what it was. Had to wait a day or so for someone to reply to my stack post telling me what tty was and how to exit it.