I am five seconds away from deciding to hop onto another distro because I am tired of the constant frustrations I am going through just to get anything done. I just want to search and get documents done on my laptop, but the freezing, lagging and bugs I’ve been seeing, is getting on my nerves.
For example these are the issues I’ve been running into lately,
- Libreoffice documents freezing while saving
- Flash drive not being read by the laptop, even though it’s plugged in and it shows that a flash drive is into the laptop
- Sometimes the laptop stays on the PopOS screen for a longer time than usual while powering down the laptop.
- (I’m not sure if this is a browser issue or a OS issue for this one) I’m constantly hopping from one browser to the next to get anything done or researched. Sometimes I have to turn off all of my extensions just for the browser to read on what I’m trying to search up.
- Some of my updates are refusing to go through and update within the system.
- I cant open certain emails. Like at all, it doesn’t matter what browser I use, it just reads that something is wrong and I don’t know on how to fix it (this was never an issue until updates started coming along)
For anyone asking about the specs: here it is from Best Buy. I purchased the laptop in March 2026.
The amount of ram you have doesn’t matter. If it is an issue with specific addresses in your RAM, and the kernel allocates pages of memory for use with a program you are rimmomg that contains those bad addresses, then you will have issues. It’s not such a common issue these days as much as it used to be twenty or thirty years ago but, it can still be an issue and is worth checking. I mean, most distro’s put memtest+ on their live boot installers for a that very reason. Since you are on pop-os CosmicDE, you should be running very stable. Definitely something is wrong, maybe hardware, maybe not. Your expectations should be that the OS is running rock solid. I definitely understand the frustrations.
If it is a hardware issue, you definitely want to find out right away, as it may be corrupting your OS or worse your files. Create a live boot thumbdrive of Pop-Os or Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever you choose, you tell your UEFI to boot from your thumbdrive and you have an install option, a boot to a live desktop option, and a memtest86 option. If memtest+ passes 100%, than go for the live desktop option. If everything is working great with a live desktop, than I would say your ram should be good. Double check SMART check is enabled on your harddrive if you have it and if that’s good than I think your hardware is probably okay still. Hardware failure is not so common these days, but it does happen and it’s worth checking it out before it corrupts your personal files, for peace of mind. Plus, if you’ve reached the point of feeling like you need to distro hop, I think that says a lot about your current situation. Something is wildly out of place. You should be running solid and stable.
I really hope it’s not a hardware issue, this laptop I have is a new laptop that I got on sale for 700 USD. I haven’t even had it for a year. I’m gonna try and make the time to do that testing and see what happens.