It started freezing maybe a month or two ago. It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later. I do not recall downloading anything around when this issue began that could be suspect.
I’ve put off fixing this because I have no idea how to even begin troubleshooting it. Internet searches for “Linux freezes” returns practically countless potential problems.
What are some recommendations? I have my root directory on a 30 GB partition separate from my home directory, which I think makes reinstalling my base image (Debian) easy without losing personal data, so that’s an option. Maybe there’s a system log file that would provide some insight?
I’m Linux dumb so please teach me how to fish!
I’ll add that my Windows install (on a separate drive) doesn’t freeze, and my Linux install is on a new Samsung drive that didn’t report issues, so the problems unlikely hardware related.
02:05 18OCT: Thanks for all the quick responses, a lot of helpful suggestions so far. I should clarify that “my computer freezes” means it is 100% unresponsive until it is rebooted. Ctrl+alt+del spam or changing terminal sessions when its frozen does not get a response. The last few entries in my most recent journalctl boot outputs are different from one another, and the I did not see any errors. For now, I’ll boot a live USB and let it sit for while, see if it crashes again.
Do you have a Ryzen CPU by any chance? I had an issue like this for ages and it turns out it was a faulty Ryzen power state that was disabled by default on Windows, but not on Linux. If this happens to be your issue, there are ways you can disable the power state in software: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Ryzen#Soft_lock_freezing