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Comment by darkteflon | Hacker News Reader

I’ve just been through this exact thing with a 3200G on Ubuntu 19 and 20. Took months to disgnose. Extremely painful. Ended up replacing the RAM and motherboard before finally determining the problem was with the CPU. Disabling C-states helped but didn’t resolve the issue. Tried a bunch of other things too, none of which ultimately worked.

In the end I switched to a 3700X; so far the problem hasn’t reoccurred. No doubt it will now that I’ve posted about it (fool me twice, shame on me).

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Worth pointing out that 3xxxG parts are Zen+ and not Zen 2 like all other Ryzen 3000 parts. So the CPU in the 3200G is very different from the one in a 3700X.

I stopped using Ubuntu 10 years ago, when I had a weird issue. Out of nowhere computer locked up and required a hard reset. It took a while when I figured out that issue originated with Intel WiFi card. I eventually found the bug, it turned out that kernel crashed whenever the adapter sensed an 802.11n packet (the protocol was very new at the time so it wasn't everywhere yet). Ubuntu still decided to go ahead with the release, yet hold off on including freshly released major version of Open Office (I think version 3), because of stability. This was extremely frustrating, because there was no fix and no option to rollback to older version. So that was when I dropped this POS and used a different distro. I'm wondering if that's again Ubuntu issue and not CPU.

Yeah. Who knows. It’s just an anecdote, really. But one that hopefully saves someone months of tedium.

There were more issues, but that one was what pushed me over the edge.

I constantly had problems when attaching/deataching external monitor to my laptop, once in a while it wouldn't switch, or various parts of desktop (like task bar etc) would move around.

When they introduced PulseAudio, it wasn't ready at the time, so there were a lot of audio problems back then.

Overall the experience with Ubuntu was that every new release was taking some old bugs away and replacing them with new ones.

I hope things improved since then.

I've been running a 3400G since last fall on Debian with a custom kernel to get the latest video drivers. It's been stable until a few freeze ups in the past week. I'd pin the blame on Ubuntu.

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