I'm facing a frustrating issue where my system hangs whenever I play any fullscreen game, currently testing with Satisfactory but it's happened with other games too. The desktop environment crashes when this happens. I've switched between various Linux distributions like Fedora KDE, Bazzite KDE, Mint Mate, and now Kubuntu. I saw some improvement on Kubuntu by installing the game on a non-boot drive, which reduced crashes, but I still end up with the desktop crashing every time I exit the game. By 'desktop crashing,' I mean the bottom panel disappears, launching applications doesn't work, and the background turns black. I've been monitoring the system apps, but they crash too, forcing me to hard reboot. I've tried checking the logs, but there's a suspicious gap in timestamps when the game is launched and when the system starts up again. Any thoughts on what to investigate next?
1 Answer
You're on the right track with checking your logs! You should consider using the `journalctl` command. After you force a crash, try using `journalctl --since "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS"` to isolate logs around the crash time. If you're suspicious it's a kernel issue, adding the `-k` flag might help too. This way, you can pinpoint any specific error messages that pop up right before your desktop crashes. Also, it couldn't hurt to run some SMART checks on your disks to make sure there's no hardware problem.
Thanks for the advice! I've looked at the logs around the crash time but didn't find anything useful. It's like there’s a hard break between the game running and the system rebooting. The timestamps are jumping around, which might just be how it logs, but it’s still odd.