Fixing Difficult to Search Problems
September 9, 2022•212 words
My daily driver OS is Linux Mint, which I have installed on my a pretty new "gaming" laptop. Every now-and-then, it would crash. Completely frozen, would respond to nothing except for a hard-reboot by holding the power button down. What on earth do I type into that little search box to figure out a solution to this problem?
I know that it wasn't just a graphics issue, I couldn't even SSH into the machine from another. Pings were unresponsive. Maybe I search for "Linux Mint system completely unresponsive random"? That didn't turn up any relevant results.
Maybe its something to do with my hardware? Perhaps "Linux Mint MSI laptop 2022 system frozen" would be a better search term? Nope, nothing particularly useful there either.
By pure chance, I was exploring the updater application, and noticed that I could select a different Linux kernel. I saw the one I was currently on, it was pretty old, but still supported. Oh.
There was a much newer one that I could select, so I figured sure, why not. I updated, and have not had a single crash in months. Incredible!
Perhaps the moral of the story is to explore more, rather than articulate more. Does that make sense? Doesn't really sound like a good moral.