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@seanpm2001@techhub.social

Post #4081094

2026-07-25 02:52 UTC

I am having severe technical issues today. I was going to restart my media player laptop, as the SWAP file was filling up, and had to cancel my backup, due to this memory issue, but upon restarting, the system began to fail severely. It was working perfectly fine prior to restarting, but now gnome-shell appears to be corrupt. CPU usage is constantly between 28% and 64% for this one process (across 20 CPU cores) all transition fade effects (such as when searching for a file, opening a dialog box, or taking a screenshot) are not showing, and there is considerable lag at all times, with the cursor being burnt into the screen at random places. The CPU is constantly spiking. Tracker-miner-fs was uninstalled years ago. Over time, I noticed more and more issues. I have restarted 6 times, but have not had any relief, I even ran the battery completely dead, and held the power button down for 30 seconds. Several terminal commands, such as systemtcl did nothing, the system is unable to connect to the Internet or bluetooth (it is acting like the network adapter is fried, it asks me to plug in a dongle, but it won't recognize my Wi-Fi dongle, nor will it accept Ethernet) I have even tried directly pinging my router, it cannot even do that. I suspect that the ports are blocked, but it seems more complex than that, as airplane mode doesn't show up as an option, it won't accept my Aux port headphones, and I can't change the brightness. When clicking on the battery in the top right corner, there are only 5 options: audio (which doesn't work) battery, settings, lock, and power off/log out. The Wi-Fi, brightness, and Bluetooth options are missing. The speakers aren't working, they just call themselves by the device name "dummy" and audio won't play, however video works fine (although CPU usage for video playback is much higher than normal) screensavers also now cause the CPU to reach a constant 90% usage rate, then immediately drop to a constant 16-20% upon turning the screensaver off. Thankfully, I can still connect USB drives to my system, and copy files to/from this drive. I also tried going to the BIOs and booting from a different kernel, but the option doesn't show up, as this is the only Linux kernel version installed. I would like to get this fixed, as I can't access the majority of my music and sound effects now, and I now no longer have a backup device to go to when I repair my current system. I really wish I just didn't restart today. Help online hasn't worked so far, articles are too lengthy, and don't get to the point. It would be easier to reinstall gnome-shell if I had an Internet connection, but it looks like I am going to have to do this manually. Any help would be appreciated. I have system logs (generated from the System76 driver tool, which unfortunately doesn't give me the option to repair drivers) but I am unsure how to safely share these, as I don't know what parts are needed, or if it contains anything confidential. #Help #TechSupport #Ubuntu22 #Linux #GNOME #GNOME-Shell #Corruption #Ubuntu #Networking #Repair

Replies (1)

  • @ds@infosec.exchange 2026-07-25 06:16

    @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...

    Open ##4081093