Post #4081093

@seanpm2001@techhub.social there's a lot to unpack here - lots of different symptoms, which could be caused by a bunch of things or could be caused by a cascade of failures from one single problem. If it were me, I'd start with two things: run dmesg and look for error messages (I/O errors, driver errors etc), and also you could try booting from e.g an Ubuntu live USB. The latter will help figure out where to look. If a live USB boots and runs OK, then it's probably the hard drive or your OS installation that is faulty. On the other hand, if things are playing up even when you're running a live USB then there's likely something else going on with hardware, like faulty memory or GPU or something. You could try installing and running something like memtest to help rule out system memory as being a problem. But having said all that, if you're hesitant to reboot again, then dmesg is probably the first place to look for hints/errors. Also check your free space using df -h in case you've run out of space or something - that can always have a fun variety of side effects...