I used to be an Ubuntu user (since 14.04) but it is becoming too heavy and “giving me some odd vibes of late” so I switched to LM. Then I was running into some system freezes on Mint 22.2 so I decided to switch to LMDE 7. It still freezes, much less frequently, but I can Logout and restart the session (while Mint was actually frozen and had to be shutdown using the power button). I also tested pure Debian 13 with Cinnamon but it looked very 80’s-ish 
So my 2 cents is that for me LMDE 7 seems like a good compromise! Give it a go!
4 Likes
Freezing of the screen can often be a video card issue, or an X11 issue
Freezing of one app is a problem in the app.
4 Likes
That’s either a hardware issue (your hardware getting old), or a change in some driver which is kind of incompatible specifically with your hardware.
If I had such freezes on my computer, I’d carefully watch the pattern, and check kernel logs as soon as recovered from such a freeze.
3 Likes
Another thing that can make a PC look to be frozen is a program (task) that is in a very tight loop.
4 Likes
Thank you for the suggestions. It’s a 10 year old laptop. It is the newest I own! I am trying to find a pattern but haven’t been able to pinpoint what triggers the freezes. If/when the next ones occur I will do that. Of course at that point I will probably need a hand to figure out what the message means… Thanks!
4 Likes
How can you log out when your laptop is frozen? I think we have to specify the state “frozen”.
3 Likes
Hold down power button and then restart
If all else fails
3 Likes
But this is not “log out”. A helpful way might be to kill and relaunch Cinnamon with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.
2 Likes
I agree, but depends on the freeze sometimes the only answer if you can do nothing else.
ESC, CTRL ALT DEL, etc
Or terminal Ctrl T then kill process.
Tried most of these over the years.
“Frozen” in the case of LMDE means that the mouse cursor moves but nothing (in Cinnamon or open programs) reacts to clicks.
2 Likes
So @abu is right… you could have a mouse problem or a X11 problem, rather than a frozen screen.
1 Like
Did you start Cinnamon with software rendering to check whether it freezes there as well?
Also check file ~/.xsession-errors.
1 Like
Care to explain how to do that, please as I dont know.
Dont think so, very unlikely, the keyboard would still function with that so getting to terminal etc.
1 Like
If you able to logout, meaning the PC is responding, but seems very, very slow.
I would suggest to try and open a terminal window and type in ‘top’ to see if there is a task that is driving the CPU usage to a very high level (a loop) or to see what task is in control before you log out.
May not help, but could give you some additional information to go on.
6 Likes
Couple of other things to try
ALT+F2 for Cinnamon restart,
CTRL+ALT+backspace to restart X11,
CTRL+ALT+F1 for open console window (Or ctrl T)
Please can you confirm which version of lmde you are using and if its the latest version did you update from the old or do a new clean install, in case something is still hanging around from older version.
4 Likes
Yes, I was wrong; this key affects the entire X11 server, not only Cinnamon.
2 Likes
It may be what’s needed though.
1 Like
I cheated and looked it up as could not remember… got to the age where need help and make notes trouble is there just notes and not in order so takes a while to find
3 Likes
I put my computer recipes in a directory and use the filesystem to ‘order’ them by storing in a whole heap of subdirectories. The subdirectories ‘index’ topics.
5 Likes
Same here! My Linux Notes folder has over a 100 entries. Some of the notes probably needs to be deleted or updated.
Oldest note = 3/22/19 – How to install Truecrypt. It was done using a PPA.
Newest one 12/04/25 – How to record streaming audio to a file.
4 Likes