Linux distro hopping history

• 05 August 2025
• notes,
• ArchLinux,
• Linux

(The following overlooks my early use of Red Hat Linux, on a Thinkpad, around the turn of the century and my repeated use of Ubuntu in VMs since then.)

The NVIDIA GK106GL [Quadro K4000] graphics card seems to cause crashes on various distros. Here’s the checkered history of my desktop machine:

• Ubuntu crash on suspend/resume.
• Fedora 35 The nouveau driver occasionally crashes and locks up the desktop, requiring a power off.
• Fedora 35 installed nvidia 470 driver.
• Fedora 36 beta.
• Fedora 36 kernel upgrade broke nvidia driver.
• Debian 11.3.0 with kernel 5.10.0 crashes every 5-10 suspend/resume cycles (bug 547?).
• Debian 11.3.0 with kernel 4.19.252+ crashes while using vscodium (bug 177).
• Debian 11.3.0 with various 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x kernels and nouveau crashes sooner or later after suspend/resume.
• Arch with nouveau and xmonad seems stable although I did experience a short period (in June 2023) where X crashed on resume that went away after another rolling upgrade. Adding the kernel parameter nouveau.noaccel=1 seemed to fix the problem.
• Upgrading arch to the 6.7 kernel ran into an out of space problem, detailed here.
• Upgrading arch to the 6.7.1 kernel caused serious problems and took a few hours to recover, detailed here.
• Upgrading to the 6.7.2 kernel was as smooth as ever, so I continue on arch (January 2024).
• March 2024: black screen after reboot. Replaced graphics card with AMD FirePro V5900.

• March 25 2024: After switching to AMD FirePro V5900, experiencing occasionally crashes on suspend/resume.
  • This is on arch with kernel 6.8.1-arch1-1
  • Kernel parameter nouveau.noaccel=1 is still configured.
  • Tried adding kernel parameter amdgpu.runpm=0 (see this)
• I was irritated by GRUB slowly painting/unpainting a rectangle round the boot menu, so I uncommented the following line in /etc/default/grub to disable the graphical terminal:

  GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=console
  

  and then rebuilt the GRUB configuration via:

  sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
  

• As of 21 May 2024 experiencing crash on resume approximately 20% of the time (sample of 42 suspend/resumes).
• After upgrading to the 6.9.6 kernel, systemctl suspend fails. The display freezes, the keyboard becomes unresponsive, but the power button does not flash, indicating the system didn’t quite make it into the sleep state. The problem does not occur when X isn’t running.
• Problem worked around using this suggestion, so may be a systemd v256 issue. Perhaps it’s related to this systemd issue or, more likely, this kernel issue.
• Re-tested after upgrade to 6.9.8 kernel and systemd 256.2-1: workaround still needed.
• With the workaround in place, suspend/resume seems to work 100% of the time.
• Re-tested after upgrade to 6.10.0 kernel and systemd 256.3-1: workaround still needed.
• Re-tested after upgrade to 6.10.1 kernel and systemd 256.4-1: workaround still needed.
• Note that the system still occasionally crashes on resume with the workaround in place.
• 7 August 2025. The SSD packed in after about five years of use, so I installed arch on a new SSD.
• 29 August 2025. So far the suspend/resume bug has not recurred.