I installed Ubuntu on an IBM ThinkPad several months ago and loved it. After a while, however, the Unity desktop began to bother me, so I installed Mint instead. Then I noticed my laptop would lock up occasionally, but that cleared up and it began working normally.

About a month ago, the freezing up began and has only gotten worse, sometimes several times within an hour. If I close the lid and the laptop hibernates, I can open it up again and log in without having to force-quit, but this can take a couple of minutes.

It's seems to freeze mostly when I'm online, but I can't pinpoint it to a particular site. A few minutes age, I was on Twitter when it froze. It's also froze when I've been in Libre Office.

The other thing I've noticed is reduced speed. I hear the drive spinning and I get the spinning cursor and have to wait longer before folders open and so forth.

I installed the Cinnamon desktop around the time this all started, but even if I log in with Gnome, it still freezes.

I'm about ready to wipe the drive and go back to Ubuntu, but I still like Mint's interface better.

Sorry for the long post. If anyone has any ideas or fixes, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

I'm sorry to inform you but Ubuntu has a reputation for being one of the most buggy distros out there, and Mint being based on Ubuntu is bound to have the same issues. If it's that bad, switch distros. There's lots out there to choose from, and i assure you many are just as easy to use than Ubuntu.

Since posting this, I've been signing in using the Gnome desktop option, and I haven't had a single freeze. I'm going to conclude that the supposedly "stable" release of the Cinnamon desktop is not so stable after all.

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johntabita
I've had the same problem - Mint freezes on Cinnamon, but fine with Gnome3. The difference in this case is the desktop not the distribution as I never had any problems with Ubuntu either as-is or as Mint. (Apart from not liking Unity!)

When I started using Cinnamon it would freeze every five minutes or so, now it's about once a week. I agree with johntabita that that's definitely not good enough.

I have read somewhere else that there is a problem with Cinammon and OpenOffice. I think I have probably always had one of the LibreOffice packages open when it froze. That said, I have usually got Chrome and LibreOffice open all the time anyway.

There is a suggestion on another site that it is OpenJDK that is the problem, and that it is best to change to Oracle Java. I've just done that and it has frozen again since.

This post: thearc77 on Sat Jun 23, 2012 1:27 am
On this page: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=90&t=103054&p=597488&hilit=mint+13+freeze#p597488

I believe cinnamon is in the early stages... it might be better to stick with pure gnome, KDE or Xfce - should be less trouble to isolate problems and get support. 'buntu add a lot of their own patches to gtk/glib, etc and that is where most of the instability comes from, I'm not sure which patches mint inherits or replaces.

Disclaimer: I'm biased - but I have to agree with Knightron, 'buntu has always been buggy as hell. Blame the 6 monthly "here it comes ready or not!" release cycle.

Caravel
I suppose it all depends on what you use it for and what you want from it. I don't do anything very clever - Chrome, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Audacity and a Java circuit board designer about covers it. The first three must work reliably. "Reliability, reliability, reliability" to misquote a politician, then usability. Over several years I have used Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian, then Mint. The only reason I changed distro was that after spending half my spare time trying to understand Linux in order to get one to work I'd decide it was time I tried another - with the exception of Ubuntu which worked! I only abandoned it because of Unity and might go back to it, if Cinammon is unreliable there is no advantage for me in using Mint over the better supported Ubuntu - now I know that I can install Gnome3 or Cinnamon (when it's reliable) instead of Unity.

It sounds as though you agree with me in that you think we should respect other peoples' views on this as I realise that there are many people out there who are quite happy to mess about with shell commands and so on. It's those people who have created Linux because they have done all the Beta testing.

Me - I've got too many hobbies already and don't want another one - just a computer that works!

Funny, I've used both Ubuntu and Mint for years, and have found them to be extremely stable. I can't recall a single instance of Linux "freezing" in that time. I don't think the distros are the issue, especially if it only happens in Cinnamon.

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well I've never used cinnamon and in this situation it seems to be cinnamon that is causing the problem. but this is cinnamon in Ubuntu. do the same issues appear in other distros offering cinnamon? if not then that emphasis my original statement. i have had buggy issues with Ubuntu and mint in the past, 10.10. I'd be downloading something from the internet and it'd freeze up on me. that unreliable and simply not good enough when you have limited bandwidth and a pricy plan. on mint I was listening to music on amarok and it used to freeze about every fourth song and need a reboot. this didn't cost me money but is still an inconvenience. these are just my experience but I've read many other unhappy customers with Ubuntu. k3lt01 and tobisgd come to mind.

I think you have summed it up quite neatly and so I having nothing to add!

Freezing during a download would tend to indicate a bad connection or buggy wireless driver. Freezing in something like Amarok, where you're playing a file, could be the application, but could also be bad memory, a bad hard drive, or a lot of other things. Applications like Amarok are developed by independent groups, not Ubuntu. If you can play audio files in another music player without issues, then it's probably an Amarok issue, not an Ubuntu issue. If you can't, it might be a problem with codecs, the audio subsystem, or any number of things. I wouldn't be so quick to condemn the entire distro just because of one bug.

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A very well reasoned comment.

the freezing, during a download, your right there are to many variables to point the finger at ubuntu, but I've never had that experience with other distros. as for amarok though, my computer is in healthy condition and amarok runs fine on other distros. amarok is developed by other independent developers not Ubuntu, but the Ubuntu team monitor the applications aloud in the repositories and provide bug fixes. the Ubuntu team tend to prefer bleeding edge new software over well tested software. if they want to take that path they're welcome to, I'm not complaining, but it does mean there is a possibility of including bugs, and I feel like there's more bugs in Ubuntu than many of the alternatives. here's another example from my self. kubuntu 11.10. *buntu tend to focus on the GUI, and such a distribution I'd think would get there GUI update manager working smoothly. I did a fresh install of this version of kubuntu (which froze twice needing a restart of installation by the way) and once it was up and running I tried to upgrade the system with the GUI update manager, I think it was synaptic or something similar. it froze on applying the updates. this was a; consistent problem and I found the only way to get the upgrades was using a;pt from the command line.
you can say what you will; and I'm glad you've had success with *buntu; and my statements/opinions are based on previous experiences, but I'm not the only one with such an opinion for *buntu. speaking of which I'd appreciate somebody else who agrees *buntu is one of the more buggy dstros to please speak up so I don't sound like I'm talking out my arse.

I would try really hard to make sure that there is not some hardware issue at the bottom of this. I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 on both my desktop and my main laptop (IBM Thinkpad), which have radically different hardware, one 64-bit, one 32-bit, one AMD based, one Intel based, and I have to say that they've both been amazingly bug-free and trouble free so far. That's my experience.

To each his own, if *buntu works for you then this is good for you. I have made different experiences with Ubuntu, which brought me down to change to Debian when 10.04 was released. I can assure you that none of the iisues was in any way related to my hardware, all of my systems (except the laptop/netbook, of course) are built by me and I have tested all of them very well, knowing my part about the hardware is a big part of my job and a remnant of my overclocker days. I believe that the shift from "we want to make a system for human beings" over "we want to be the third largest OS in the market" to "I predict to have 200 million users in 4 years" together with the short release cycle and the "we rather add shiny features than fix bugs" attitude caused the decline in stability many people observed.

I disagree. If there are bugs in a package I downloaded from a official Ubuntu repository then it is an Ubuntu issue, not an Amarok issue. This is clearly an issue that is caused not spending enough time to work out the bugs. Doesn't it speak for itself that Canonical recommends to their LTS users (and I bet all of their business users are LTS users) not to upgrade to 12.04 LTS now, but to wait until the first point release is out. That translates to me as: "Let all the consumers jump in on it, we can use them for beta testing and when we have worked out the bugs we didn't find in our to short release cycle then we invite the business users to upgrade." Just to compare it to another major OS that is considered to be buggy by many people, most IT departments in companies that use Windows on their machines would never do an upgrade before the first Service Pack is released, which is basically the same as a point release for Ubuntu.

So I can only say, good luck, may your Ubuntu experience be as bug free as possible, but also look around and see how many people have problems with bugs in Ubuntu and then maybe think again about the quality of Ubuntu.