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.
Honestly same. I ended up switching to mint. Tired of fussing with it
I was thinking of trying mint or Zorion OS
I’d recommend trying fedora KDE or Ubuntu. Both are mainstream distros that are well supported and have up to date hardware support.
Isnt Ubuntu using AI in their programming? I really dont wanna be bothered with bugs because of it. Pop OS uses Ubuntu as well, so if im going through this cause of who know whats, i dont think i would want to try Ubuntu
I mean Linux itself heavily uses LLMs to assist in programming.
Also both Zorin OS and Mint are based on top of Ubuntu. So it would be the same except the distros are less used and have worse support.
Lastly I know some people on Lemmy really loud and assume that any LLM assisted coding = bugs and bad. But in reality neither Linux itself nor Ubuntu, nor Fedora are “vibe coded”. It’s mostly LLM assisted bug finding. They’re literally finding thousands of old (pre LLM) bugs per Linux kernel release.
Cause then you hear the LLM is used in the programming and causing the bugs, with the refusal of people fixing them or taking forever to fix them. Its hard to trust anything cause of that.
Not everything you hear is true. LLMs are responsible for finding and helping fix thousands of bugs.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-CVEs-Nearly-2000
There is a big difference between a professional coders being assisted by a LLM and “AI slop”. I hate AI slop, but not all LLM assisted code is slop.
What are your qualms with mint my I ask? It seems to have natively accepted any hardware I’ve thrown it on. Intel/AMD, NVIDIA/Radeon nothing has come back with driver issues.
The only issue I think I’ve had with 1 machine i believe is a dependency issue I haven’t looked into yet, because python3 wasnt being updated from the standard apt update/upgrade.
Mint back in the day had a valid reason for being. It made installing proprietary codecs and drivers easy. It was based on Ubuntu but handled the stuff that Ubuntu just refused to.
Now days Ubuntu handles proprietary codecs and drivers very well. There is no “point” to using Mint now. You get a downstream smaller community and lose the support that that larger upstream distro has.
Mint isn’t bad per say, but in 2026 I don’t see why you would choose it instead of the thing it’s based on.
I mostly get concerned when I see new to Linux users choose smaller less well supported distros instead if mainstream ones. Less so with mint but very much so with Zorin.
Because there is still the mindset unfortunately that Linux can be slighly intimidating if your not a programmer. We’re picking the smaller distros cause they’re supposed to be more user based friendly, but apparently thats not the case.
Ah I see. Yeah I used to stick to Debian/Ubuntu for most everything, I tried pop OS but it didn’t run well on the laptop I was using. Mint seems to do alright whether something has barley any resources or does have a plethora.
I’ll have to install Ubuntu on something again sometime and see what it’s been up too.
I’d recomed giving Fedora a shot. Fedora + Niri / Noctalia is my daily driver now. But Fedora KDE is great on its own.
Cosmic desktop has been neat but it definitely needed more time to bake before hitting the general release. Just last weekend I did an update that dropped me to the emergency terminal and took half a day to repair. Pop was my go to “it just works” but right now I can’t in good consciousness recommend it for average users, especially gamers. Hell I still have to drop to gnome to play half my games, and the other half usually have visual bugs that I’ve tinkered with for ages. I’m sure it will stabilize, but they should have kept it on the beta branch for longer.
That’s why I really wanted to try Pop. I have a Steam account and I really wanted to set it up but I can’t with all these dam bugs, it’s been frustrating for the past month or so and I’m getting tired with trying to tinker with it. I’m glad I see that there are others as well seeing the issues. Visually, I really like cosmic, but I agree, they really need to work on the bugs
I’m not experiencing any of these issues. Did you make any unique configuration changes recently other than the updates?
No, just updates. I work on my libre office excel and word documents and browse the web. That’s all I do on my laptop. When the updates come, I just install them, but lately, these are the problems I’ve been having and I don’t know on what else to do.
That sounds like a terrible experience. At first glance it also sounds like a hardware issue but updating anything with an Ubuntu base was always painful to me.
It would help if you gave a little bit more info (like logs), without it, this is my blind guess:
- 1, 2 points to a storage drive on your system
- 5 points to your system drive specifically, that some parts of the drive are failing. Although I would expect that to happen with HDDs, not SSD
- 3 has logs, you can switch to the detail screen during the shutdown splash by hitting Esc? Or maybe a different one on Ubuntu, don’t remember. Should tell you which service doesn’t want to stop (and if it’s always the same one, if you check multiple times)
- As for 4 and 6…I cannot fathom how is that happening
I have no idea what your talking about but, im definitly gonna update the post with my laptop specs, eventually and see if that helps.
That’s doesn’t sound good. I have been running pop-os24.04, updating all the time and haven’t run into any issues. I switched over from Ubuntu when CosmicDE beta released. Are you running on the the newer pop-os 24.04 w/ CosmicDE or the older pop-os22.04 with GnomeShell? I can’t speak for the older GnomeShell version but, if you are running the newer CosmicDE Epoch1.11 than I would say you should expect everything to be running very stable even if some features are not complete yet. If you are running the CosmicDE Epoch1.11 and having these issues you describe, I would suspect some sort of hardware issue like memory. Most distro install images come with a memtest option on their usb live boot installer. Since you are on the brink of distro hopping, might be worth creating a live boot usb thumbdrive and running the memtest or just booting into the live desktop and exercising that. Either would be a good way to see if there is some sort of hardware issue or if it’s your currently installed OS. Hope this helps.
I’m running Pop Os 24.04 with Cosmic 1.11.0, with my windowing system being Wayland. My memory on my laptop is 15 GB of ram, when active i only use 4 GB out of the 15. When the computer is resting, it’s only using 2GB. Im only using about 20% of my Ram.
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.
Laptop specs?
I updated my post and provided the link to where i got it from.
I had a similar experience with pop, the freezing was unbearable. Many audio issues with pipewire, felt like everything was a fight and like I was searching for solutions more than enjoying the OS. Much happier having switched, the enthusiasm returned immediately.
I’m gonna run some hardware test just in case if could be my hardware but if it isn’t, I’ll definitely be switching.
fwiw I hopped a lot but landed on Endeavor, hope you find your distro soon :)
It sounds like your ram or CPU is dying (or overheating)
I’m going to run a ram and CPU hardware testing, but I can say neither overheat when I go on my laptop. My Ram runs low when I do work on my laptop (in total has 15 GB), plus it’s a new laptop, unless the hardware is complete ass when it was built.
