My laptop seems very finicky with linux and enjoys periodically freezing. Some distributions are more stable than others and I’d like to keep testing other distributions without reinstalling/ downloading/transferring all my apps and steam games constantly....
I feel you. The bugs that get the machine to crash and you have zero chance of getting any useful debug information, are by far the most annoying ones.
In my experience it’s most of the time some driver issues in the kernel or the (NVidia) proprietary drivers. Or an hardware issue. On Debian I can install several kernel versions alongside each other. So there would be no need for me to install more than one distribution. Most of the times a proper crash isn’t caused by the userspace anyways, so it boils down to the different kernel versions and configurations anyways. You could also try an older kernel.
Maybe just start with the different versions available in your distro’s package manager. I’ve never downloaded a custom kernel from somewhere else. (Well, I have but that was embedded stuff and not a desktop computer.)
On my debian machine something like journalctl -b 1 -k shows stuff. There’s also lots of debug files in /var/log/ like boot.logdebug, kern.log, messages, syslog.
But it somehow needs to be able to store the log on your disk. If the system craps out completely, it won’t get written to disk. The magic SysRequest keys might help if it only freezes. I learned “Raising elephants is so utterly boring.” You might wanna goggle that and learn how to do it.
Other than that, I mostly look at all logs (no ‘-b1’ and search for the place where it rebooted. Sometimes you find other related stuff while scrolling. But my own (old) thinkpad doesn’t ever crash.
I think there are other crash-dump tools available. It believe there’s something called ‘kdump-tools’ available on Debian. YMMV.
pages like this also suggest things like updating the BIOS and the graphics card firmware with some AMD tool. And I’ve read several times you should try the kernel parameter amdgpu.runpm=0
Make sure to do all of that first. And observe if the freezes happen in certain circumstances. Maybe you can deduct something from that. Maybe it happens while gaming (GPU). Or when under load. Or if you move it around (loose connection), or when hot or after a certain time even if idle. Disable power management and see if that helps. Should be less effort than installing 5 operating systems. (If the crash isn’t super rare) And try using the magic SysReq keys to force linux to sync and reboot to see if the kernel is still alive somehow.
Well the bugtracker and additional features are not inside of the git repository. So they’d get lost. But each ‘git clone’ is a complete clone of the (source code) repository including all of the history of changes, the commit messages, dates and individual changes. That’s stored on every single computer that cloned the repository and you have a copy of everything locally. Though it might be out of date if you didn’t pull the latest changes. But apart from that it’s the same data that Github stores. You could just make it available somewhere else and continue.
I think there isn’t really something “authoritative” in Git. You can upload your changes somewhere or another developer can download changes from you. You can also all make incompatible changes and then you won’t be able to sync it anymore (you’d need to fix that first and manually handle the conflict). There’s nothing authoritive in it. In practice most people choose a central place and all upload their changes there and everybody else regularly pulls them from there. But you could as well directly do it with the computer of your colleague if you have a network connection and access to it. Files including history of changes are the same on every machine and server. (If they’re all up to date). It’s like storing a directory including past versions on 10 different computers.
Can flatpaks be installed and accessed from another partition on the same drive?
My laptop seems very finicky with linux and enjoys periodically freezing. Some distributions are more stable than others and I’d like to keep testing other distributions without reinstalling/ downloading/transferring all my apps and steam games constantly....
[Discussion] Git - How is it classified?
I could research this on my own, but was interested in hearing from the community....