Could this be a snaps thing?

I despise snaps and left Ubuntu for that reason. I don't remember the specifics but I think even after installing firefox with apt it somehow get's magically switched to a snap.

I daily drive debian on a t490s and it's rock solid. There's just no way anyone could consider this set up unstable.

In recent years I've found most of my problems come from the fancy new packages. In order of reliability I find that it goes apt > .dev > AppImage > flatpak > snap

I'll likely be downvoted for this, but if you're committed to Linux, you might want to reconsider using Ubuntu (or Fedora for that matter). Ubuntu has a well-earned reputation for trying to make things "easy" by obfuscating what it's doing from the user (hence that useless error message). They're also a corporate distro, so their motivations are for their profit rather than your needs (wait 'til you had about Snap).

A good starting distro is Debian (known for stable, albeit older) software. It's a community Free software project and the 2nd-oldest Linux distro that's still running as well as the basis for a massive number of other distros (including Ubuntu). The installer is straightforward and easy too.

Or if you're feeling ambitious, I'd recommend Arch or Gentoo. These distros walk you through the install from a very "bare metal" perspective with excellent documentation. Your first install is a slog, but you learn a great deal about the OS in the process, ensuring that you have more intimate knowledge when something goes wrong.

Running a framework 16 with FedoraKDE and before that a 4gb ram 2015 toshiba satellite (in 2024) running Fedora (regular Gnome) and haven't had one of these issues. Most issues I have had were caused by me, every now and again I run into a regular old bug in something and half the time that gets fixed pretty quick.

I wish I could help, but we just have opposite experiences unfortunately. That said, because of this I don't think it's "linux," or I'd likely have at least similar experiences.

OH for a while I did have a bug where VLC would stutter playing video and nobody had a fix, so I uninstalled/reinstalled VLC and it works now. Idk, I've had shit like that happen on windows too though, it's basically the software version of power cycling hardware when it acts up.

It’s certainly weird that you have these issues on a Framework + an officially supported distribution.

Does it really run flawlessly on Windows 11? Because we have Framework 13’s at work, which run W11 and they DO NOT run flawlessly.

What about a fresh installation of Ubuntu? Do you have issues then? It could be some kind of configuration that you do, that screws with your system?

People downvoting a post asking for help have very weak egos. I hope you’re able to find a better Linux experience, OP.

This has not been my experience. I'm not on Ubuntu, but OpenSUSE and NixOS. Everything works and operates as expected everytime. The only issue once was nvidia driver updated versions before kernel did and I had to reboot to a previous snapshot and wait a few days till the kernel update was released to work with whatever happened to the driver. But 8 years of a dependable system otherwise

This blows my mind, honestly. Since I moved to Linux about 8 years ago, I've had little to no issues. No force of nature can ever make me go back to Windows and it's constant crashing for no reason. I run PopOS on a PC, Fedora Workstation on my laptop, my wife is also in Fedora, kids too (Nobara), and everything works. Mind you, the only device that is "made for Linux" is my laptop.

Your experience is very out of the ordinary.

Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted… all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.

Well, I'm pretty sure I had this happen once or twice in the recent past after wake from suspend I think, but it might be that my CPU is just one of the faulty intel ones.

Either way the rest of this does not reflect my experience at all. Try distrohopping, I feel like you'll find one that you like and doesn't have these issues. openSuSE is always one of my suggestions, it was the one that I used for a long time when I started out as well, but tbh I'm out of touch with the more mainstream distros, I've only touched Gentoo and NixOS in the past >5 years. (I also specifically recommend against using Ubuntu.)

Then I’ll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won’t.

Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I’ll get a popup asking to wait or quit.

Check journalctl --user, and also htop, specifically the process state, for the last one (you mention a NAS, is it perhaps stuck on IO? I'm in a fucked network where that regularly happens with my NAS.)

Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it… leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can’t fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.

This was my experience as well ... 20 years ago. I've not had many of these issues over the past few years using any distro. I used Debian for a couple years and now I'm on Arch. Really, it just works for me...

TBH now that I think about it, I ran in to more issues with Ubuntu than just simply using Debian.

it sounds like something underlying is wrong, so would test everything that is underlying your system.

a memtest is the easiest first check. i wouldn't rely on the one that's on your system since it could be bad too, but it's still worth it give it a try since it only takes a few seconds. if it finds anything, then there's definately something wrong with your hardware.

instead, i would rely on a usb stick with the ubuntu image you downloaded. first verify that the checksum for the ubuntu image you have on a trusted computer is the same that ubuntu has on its website. then copy it to your usb stick and then use memtest from there. if it comfirms that your ram is okay, use ubuntu's installation tools to verify that image on the usb stick is good; google or deepseek can show you how with easy to copy/paste commands.

in your shoes, i would re-install because at his point because then there's confidence that the base steps are verified and should be working correctly and then you can move onto othere testing strategies if you continue to experience the same behavior.

It's purely anecdotal but every time I've used an Ubuntu based distro it has been unstable or it nuked itself after 6 months to a year of use. I've been on fedora for 2-3 (4?) years now and I've not had a single issue apart from the Nvidia drivers behaving wonky sometimes.

Unrelated to OP—

This community is the fuckin sauce! Y’all really jump in to support each other and it’s really cool :)

I just set up a usb boot for mint yesterday and am prepping my pc to switch once I feel confident enough about Linux. I’m starting to gather that will be much sooner knowing the community is here to help out! I can’t wait to get all my services switched to FOSS alternatives.

NAS shared folders

now that is something that can easily make the system unstable, especially a laptop that will disconnect from the network at least ince in a while. my experience is with KDE, that if there's an unresponsive SMB mount 8n the filesystem, the whole KDE plasma environment fill freeze left and right, maybe with the exception of the window manager. but I have experienced this with other programs too. I suspect they all do filesystem accesses on the main thread and that's why when a directory read hangs, they can't do anything even handle clicksuntil the read times out.

its infuriating honestly, in a sense. of course, I have got all my money back lol. but it's like nobody is testing software with SMB shares, but I guess probably same goes for NFS, SSHFS or anything remote

I work in a small lab. Our systems are controlled using two computers that run 24/7. The main real-time control stack is open source and open hardware. I happens in a Linux box that runs NixOS. I would trust my life to that machine and fly it to the end of the universe and back again. It just never fails. We can even run updates while everything keeps running undisturbed. Some devices need drivers that only work with Windows. The second computer runs those under Windows 11. In contrast we have to babysit that machine constantly, USB connections are unreliable, things fail randomly. When we have to update, the world comes to a halt. It‘s an amazing difference.

You ever run a memtest?

If it’s for work, I’d suggest using whatever works for you best. Sounds incredibly frustrating so I don’t know why’d you be so set on ditching windows. Use the tools that work for you. Having said that, I’ve been running Linux since early 0.99 kernels and Debian since 1.3 and stability is really unmatched these days.

Your screen flicker issues with browser sound like hardware acceleration related bugs and I’d hazard a quess that random freezes and reboots have something to do with graphics drivers as well. But of course it’s impossible to tell without logs, which you didn’t provide.

I use Debian on an old Thinkpad and (mostly) don't have such issues. Installs and upgrades in particular work fine. I had probs with the wifi driver on my x220 but it works fine on the similar t520. Framework might be trying to do too much.