Hello. Been using Bazzite (KDE, Nvidia) as my daily driver for about a month now. It’s fast, it has all my apps, and it plays games. Exactly what I needed, so kudos!
However, I have been progressively experiencing a problem where Bazzite randomly hard-reboots without warning. The screens go black and the computer reboots. No errors on the screen, no errors on any open consoles.
I’ve checked the logs with journalctl and there’s absolutely nothing of interest at the end of them. In fact, “-b 1” last boot takes me back to the 14th, the last intentional shutdown.
I have temperature monitors; the CPU and GPU aren’t getting hot. I have performance monitors; I have a 16 core 32 thread CPU, and it’s hard to saturate it except in benchmarks or Steam compiling shaders, so it’s not getting overloaded. I have 64GB of RAM, and I’ve never seen it’s utilization fill up. It happens when I’m running games sometimes, it happens when I’m not. It happens when I’m just watching YouTube, it happens when I’m not. It happens when I’m idle overnight too, with nothing open except the lock screen.
I’m kinda at a loss on how to tackle this problem. I’m a pretty experienced Linux admin in the Ubuntu world, but not sure how to tackle the problem inside the Bazzite environment. The fact that there are no errors or extreme machine states as far as I can tell makes it really hard for me to know where to start. Any and all advice would be welcome!
It sounds like maybe hardware.
Is this a desktop?
You could boot a live iso of some other distro (Debian perhaps), and see if it shuts down overnight. That would mostly eliminate (or not) Bazzite as the culprit.
I made an account to post this exact same issue as I’m experiencing it, too, for the last two-ish months. No errors that I can detect in the logs as for the cause. It’s very random when it happens, but I am using an Asus ROG laptop with a dual GPU (AMD/Nvidia) and a wireless keyboard and mouse (Logitech). The last few times it’s happened were when I opened up Kdenlive and Krita, so I’m thinking it may be centered in the GPU side of things, but it doesn’t do it at all when playing games.
Yes, this is a desktop and I have a companion Ubuntu partition that I’ve been using for a year plus without this issue. I’ll go back to Ubuntu for a bit and see if something’s changed in my hardware in the last month, just for good luck, but I’ve really come to prefer Bazzite!
@Muddobbers despite being a desktop I do also have a hybrid graphics setup because one of my monitors is Thunderbolt/USB-C only, and that goes through the USB-C Thunderbolt port on my motherboard which goes through the integrated graphics; my secondary monitor goes through the Nvidia graphics card. One of the things I appreciated about Bazzite KDE is that it just picked up the Apple monitor without missing a beat; my Ubuntu GNOME desktop had to be manually configured to light the monitor up.
So I’ll spend some time back in Ubuntu just to see what’s up, although I just moved everything into the Bazzite install…
Any other ideas on instrumentation or logs maybe I can check to see what’s going on? Because the main log pretty tame. I don’t see anything helpful in the timestamp discontinuities.
I have switched back to my Ubuntu desktop for the last couple of days. I’ve tried to recreate the various activities I’ve done in Bazzite where I experienced a shutdown and have not recreated it in Ubuntu.
This includes an all-day test where I had 2 Eve Online clients running all day whilst I watched videos and did various day-to-day tasks on top of them. I left the clients running overnight whilst I slept until they were disconnected automatically for the daily server farm maintenance window at Eve Online. (Convenient that Eve won’t auto-kick you in stations like other games will when you’re idle, all whilst having a very complex scene to keep my GPU busy!) My computer (and room) got nice and warm but I had no shutdowns.
As far as I can tell with this incredibly scientific testing process is that it’s not a hardware issue, but some interaction with Bazzite’s underlying OS stuff.
I’m not sure what it is that would cause Linux to just reboot or shutdown without any notification or logging, any ideas?
I‘ve also had Bazzite crash on me a few times during games (tho I would chalk up the crashes in MC to using Zink).
Only ended my session and spit me out on the login screen tho.
I‘m on Bluefin now. Haven‘t really gamed on it yet, so no crashes so far.
I’ve experimented some more and after disconnecting my wireless keyboard and mouse and using a wired pair instead, my random reboots and crashes reduced significantly. The only wireless things I have now are my controller and wi-fi, and I still only randomly get them so I think it’s something to do with wireless. Again, I am using a dual GPU (with Nvidia) laptop so I think a huge amount of my issues are my side of things.
After a couple of days in Ubuntu with no issues, I switched back to Bazzite, and had a blissful couple of days with no crashes. Even with multiple Eve Online clients and lots of tabs open, for about 4 days I had a rock solid computer.
Within the last 24 hours I’ve had three random reboots with nothing in the logs that I can find, including one about 5 minutes ago where the computer just rebooted in the middle of writing a blog post on Wordpress.
This is infuriating because I’m not getting any feedback as to why these reboots happen. No error messages, no popups, and no consistent trigger.
I have wired peripherals so I don’t think it’s that, besides, I’d expect something in the logs. Journalctl has a lot of log spam from the flatpak install of Discord and I wonder if there’s something there. Just a lot of complaints about resources being loaded and not used in a short period of time.
This is really sad because I’ve come to really love the workflow and setup of Bazzite, but random reboots are intolerable, especially when my Ubuntu install is solid as a rock.
Anyone have any debugging ideas on how to compare and contrast the installs?
Interestingly enough, the last couple of reboots, I’ve found this in the log just before I go down:
Jun 10 09:01:21 Clippy.lan NetworkManager[1920]: <info> [1749567681.7834] device (wlp9s0): set-hw-addr: set MAC address to 02:2A:DB:C9:5F:44 (scanning)
Jun 10 09:01:21 Clippy.lan NetworkManager[1920]: <info> [1749567681.8062] device (wlp9s0): supplicant interface state: inactive -> interface_disabled
Jun 10 09:01:21 Clippy.lan NetworkManager[1920]: <info> [1749567681.8063] device (p2p-dev-wlp9s0): supplicant management interface state: inactive -> interface_disabled
Jun 10 09:01:21 Clippy.lan NetworkManager[1920]: <info> [1749567681.8153] device (wlp9s0): supplicant interface state: interface_disabled -> inactive
Jun 10 09:01:21 Clippy.lan NetworkManager[1920]: <info> [1749567681.8153] device (p2p-dev-wlp9s0): supplicant management interface state: interface_disabled -> inactive
Wireless is built into my motherboard, but I thought I had it disabled because I have a wired connection. When I opened up the network widget I saw that it was enabled (but interestingly enough, when you hovered over the toggle switch, the tool tip claimed it was disabled).
Wifi appears to be disabled in my System Settings (it doesn’t appear in the Network Picker) and in the widget (there are no available Wifi endpoints) so we’ll see if this might be it.
Made an account too to say this has also started happening to me over the last couple days. Been happily using Bazzite since December 2024 with no issues, now I’m getting sudden unexpected reboots with no explanation for why it’s behaving this way. Wasn’t doing anything hard drive intensive either.
I will say though, distrobox updates have been consistently failing for probably about a month now. Doubtful that has anything to do with it but figured I’d mention it anyway.
Just happened again out of the blue… this is the 3rd time today in less than 2 hours. I only had discord and my system monitor open. System usage was low in stats, there was nothing crazy happening stats-wise.