The year of Linux on the desktop was the friends we made along the way…

In practice, Machine Owner Keys are a thing, though it depends on Microsoft still signing shim, I believe.

Having Microsoft in the chain of trust rather than a standards body is rather concerning, though.

Modern hardware absolutely should have an encryption processor; TPM just isn’t great.

Zaphod’s just zis guy, you know?

It gets less essential the more memory you have, though I have 32GB of RAM on my desktop and still have 32GB swap space, which is probably way overkill, but I can afford it for now become I have a 2TB SSD that still has several hundred gigabytes left and could probably have a bit freed. With the memory shortage caused by “artificial intelligence” companies, I may have to go less crazy on the storage now, though.

That just sounds like insufficient swap space, honestly. For part of the summer of 2024, I used a laptop from 2016 with 8 GB of RAM as my man portable devicr. The swap partition size I used was fine for most things but a but small; however, I’d occasionally run Spleeter and run out of memory, leading to the issues you experienced, which were alleviated by just adding a temporary swap file. Before that, I used a gen 1 Surface Go, also with 8 GB RAM.

I don’t like Ubuntu, but objectively, this is probably a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I mean, you can try another distro to be sure, but the chances of it solving the issue are slim.

Wait… It’s a used stick? For future reference, that’s a key piece of information. I’m guessing it had a life before it was a server, making it older than 3 years. Depending on the history of the old laptop, I’d guess there’s a solid chance that stick is just worn out.

I’d disagree on the 16GB part. It’s nice to have, but I think 8GB is perfectly fine for most non-gaming use cases. Heck, a couple years ago, I used a laptop from 2010 with 4GB quite comfortably.

I mean, get at least 16GB if you can, especially in a dev setup, but 8 GB hasn’t murdered that many people yet.

I have an E16 gen 1 AMD that I run in a similar configuration- 8 GB soldered + 16 GB SODIMM. I’ve had no problems.

I’d recommend what others have suggested - try reseating the RAM and run a memory test. Also, what distro are you using, not that it’ll necessarily help.

Most software on that front works. I usually just use Cura for slicing.

Honestly, AV1 software decode isn’t that bad on most recent hardware. My desktop with 2018 hardware does it just fine, and so does my 2023 laptop.

USB Wi-Fi adapters are usually fine. I do have a PCI-E Wi-Fi card in my desktop from my Hackintosh days, though, which has gone unused since my home now has lots of ethernet connections.

I used Linux in a VM and WSL for several years, and I occasionally used it on an old laptop. It was in 2022 on the week I installed Cygwin that I thought, “I do more Linux stuff than Windows stuff. Why don’t I just straight up use Linux?”

I created a test install on a secondary drive, which has now been my main install for years and has been moved to a bigger drive twice.

I got very used to Linux, and Windows gave me no reason to come back.

M.2 Caddy

I’d just recommend checking hard drive SMART scores and stuff like that. Maybe run a memory test as well.

If you scroll down in journalctl, it can go later in time. Also, you can check different boots by changing the b parameter, with -b 0 being the current boot, -b -1 being the previous boot, b -2 being the boot before that, etcetera.

For UFW, I’d just try unblocking the Proton ports if it says they’re blocked in Proton settings. Also, check to make sure you don’t have two firewalls installed; while this once again shouldn’t crash the system, my PC did some very weird things when both UFW and firewalld were installed.

Alright then. That probably eliminates the lp thing. Can I ask: what journalctl command (or logging command in general, if not journalctl) did you use? I’d recommend giving the results of journalctl -b -1 -p 3 and dmesg.

Also, it’d probably be a good idea to tell us what ports are getting blocked; that shouldn’t be personally identifying in any way. After doing research on what those ports are and what ProtonVPN requires, try experimenting with unblocking some of them if you can; a blocked port shouldn’t crash your system, but it’s worth a shot.

I might also recommend looking at a task manager, just to make sure some application isn’t taking up all your memory and causing the system to freeze.

Finally, take a look at your CPU temps in case this is some kind of cooling failure.

I don’t think it’s ProtonVPN, at least not directly, as those happened over 20 minutes before the crash (I’m assuming it happened somewhere around 9:32:30)

That last one looks really odd, and I’m wondering what that kernel module is used for. I’m looking around real quick.

EDIT: Looks like it’s for line printers. I’m trying to think why your kernel would randomly load that. Can we see the contents of the following?:

• /etc/modules-load.d/modules.conf
• /usr/lib/modules-load.d/modules.conf
• /usr/local/lib/modules-load.d/modules.conf (if it exists)
• /run/modules-load.d/modules.conf (if it exists)

Also, can you give us more information about your hardware, just to be sure?

xkcd 1085:

I was talking less install a bootkit and giving it back to be and more just straight-up stealing the laptop and seeing if they can get any personal info they can sell before formatting it and eBaying it.

Still, your points are totally valid.