I've been using Linux Mint on my old Windows PC for about two weeks now, and I've run into a frustrating problem. The system freezes or locks up after being idle for a while. When I come back, the screen is off, and I can't revive it—I have to do a hard shut down. I tried turning off the idle screen settings, but it just shows the screensaver frozen at the time of the last freeze. I also learned about the Raising Elephants method to restart, but it doesn't work for me; the shutdown starts but never completes, and I have to restart again. I added a swap file after the issue started, but that didn't help. I've checked my BIOS, and it's up to date, and I even did a clean install of Mint, but the freezing happened again the next day. I'm looking for any tips or solutions that could help me resolve this issue!
4 Answers
I had the same problem with Mint, and after a lot of headaches, I switched to Fedora with KDE instead, and everything works perfectly on the same hardware. It’s really weird how that works out!
I’ve seen issues where if I boot up without the monitor on, the OS doesn’t connect properly when I turn it on. Maybe your setup has a similar problem when the monitor goes into suspend?
It might help to check your system logs after a crash. You can run `sudo journalctl -k -b -1` to see the messages from the previous boot. Try looking for any errors with `sudo journalctl -k -b -1 | grep -C5 -i error`. Remember to do this right after a reboot from the freeze, before shutting down again!
Just to clarify, make sure to run that command right after rebooting from the crash so you capture the right log!
As a suggestion, you could also try installing Ubuntu 25.10 to see if the behavior changes. It might give you more stability.
Could it be a Mint-specific issue? I feel like I've heard about bugs like this before.