Unstable Cinnamon

[snipertyler]

Has anyone noticed a decrease in stability in Cinnamon in Mint 17.1? (Cinnamon 2.4.5)

This isn't a complaint - The advice to upgrade to 17.1 was well advised to be wary of regressions

But in 17, I very rarely if ever had cinnamon crash on me, but recently it has been crashing every few days, during expo & scale, during updates, etc. I'm also not sure on how to report these as I can't seem to reproduce them reliably.
Generally "fixing" it involves going into a tty, running

Code: Select all

cinnamon --replace -d :0

then going into the gui, opening up a terminal and typing

Code: Select all

cinnamon --replace&

(& to set it into background)
then finally going into troubleshooting and replacing cinnamon, although I don't think the last one helps lol.

I upgraded from 17 to 17.1 (first time not doing clean install) so is this happening to anyone else besides myself?

[Hoser Rob]

WHat's the difference between "cinnamon --replace -d :0" and ctl-alt-backspace? They both seem to restart the window manager. Haven't tried the former.

You need to find out what your graphics card is and then search "ubuntu 14.04 <whatever that is>".

I switched to Mint 17 because the latest lts ubuntu 14.04 Mint is based on isn't as stable as I'd like ... it may be a ubuntu lts but it doesn't use the linux lts kernel version. What this means is that the ubuntu developers are going to have to do all the kernel backports for their releases themselves.

This is why Mint is basing all their releases until 2016 on ubuntu 14.04, which I think is smart.

So the fact that mint releases kernel updates later than ubuntu, which for some is a bug, for me is a feature. And I'm not going to upgrade to 17.1 or whatever.

Frankly when I've an issue in Mint I've searched ubuntu sites first. I don't like the Unity DE they make, and I think their packaging of other DEs is bad and getting worse ... Lubuntu 14.04 was so bad I can't believe they put their name on it ... but their tech support is very good.

If you can't find out how to config your video card for 17.1 ... which I suspect is the problem ... you may have to downgrade to or reinstall mint 17.

[facugomez]

Hi!
I've LMDE 2 cinnamon, and I'm also experiencing this increased instability of the Desktop Environment (Cinnamon). With the LMDE 1 version, the screen "becomes crazy" some times and it was also in some parts (like menu icons), but now... instability increased almost half the time I open a new windows, specially if I have more than 3 or 4 already opened. The screen "becomes crazy". It looks like an old TV tuner with bad reception or satellite interferences... so, I should restart Cinnamon (Alt+F2, and "r"). I should restart about 10-15 times every day (with the LMDE 1, it happened just once a day).
I do not know what happens, and also found little information about it.
I'll be very grateful with any help!!

[karlchen]

Hello, facugomez.

Be aware please that the thread is about Cinnamon 2.4.5 on the Ubuntu based Linux Mint 17.1. Cinnamon on Linux Mint Debian Edition 2 may be the same or quite different. You cannot draw any direct conclusions from Mint 17.1 to LMDE2 or vice versa. The two Mint editions are independent OSes.
By the way, for me Cinnamon 2.4.8 on Mint 17.1 32-bit works in a very stable way. So far I have not experienced any freezes or automatical restarts of Cinnamon after crashing.

Cheers,
Karl

[ghf]

I have noticed the same instability after updating a month ago.

It's not a complete crash but more like a 20 second narcoleptic attack.
I then can move the mouse smoothly, but clicks don't have any effect.
Having a video running in Firefox seems to increase the probability.

At the same time the cpu load seems to be high; the fans roar, but then
they are _much_ louder under Mint than under Win7 already in the normal
case. The Dell fan package made the fans change speed continuously.
Insufferable.

The machine is a Dell Precision M6600 Laptop, core i7, 4*2 threads,
16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 512GB rotating disk, dual boot with Win7,
NVIDIA Quattro 4000M, nvidia drivers(nouveau seems to behave
the same), Cinnamon 17.1-64

Another weird effect with this machine is that the screen sometimes
changes to the default Mint 17 background when I insert an USB
internet stick. I can re-establish my own image without problems,
but I wonder what the connection might be. That never used to
happen before.

BTW direct-x in a VIRTUAL Win7 VMware machine did not work with
nouveau, but it works with the nvidia driver. (for Altium Designer)

regards, Gerhard

[catch22]

...Another weird effect with this machine is that the screen sometimes
changes to the default Mint 17 background when I insert an USB
internet stick. I can re-establish my own image without problems,
but I wonder what the connection might be...

Cinnamon 17.1-64 is the most stable desktop I've ever had.
It stopped my distro-hopping completely
(I still favour Crunchbang on the netbook though)

The only thing that - rarely(!!) - happens, is what you describe here above.
When I plug in my external drive, the background sometimes goes to the default one.