I recently bought an HP 14-em0002la to replace an HP laptop that mysteriously failed on me. The laptop has an AMD Radeon graphics card and AMD Ryzen 5 7000 series processors. This is the same hardware that I had on my previous laptop, which worked fine until the machine broke down one day.
I wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu 22.04 from a USB drive, as is standard practice. I now encounter random, but irritatingly frequent, desktop crashes on the HP 14-em0002la, and I have no idea why. Nothing I could find in any of the log files indicated any sort of failure or crash, but I am not an expert on system administration. I typically use the laptop at home with a second monitor attached vía HDMI. Disconnecting the second monitor does not seem to have had any effect on the likelihood of desktop crashes. The crashes are not only random, but of varying intensity. Sometimes the desktop will only hang for a minute or so, and then return to normal operation. Sometimes the desktop will hang, Dropbox will crash, and then return to operation. Other times, the display will freeze and the system will stop accepting all mouse and keyboard input, requiring a hard reset. As I said, none of these incidents seem to be recorded in the system log. I have also noticed other unusual issues, such as Firefox displaying bizarre artifacts or colors when used in the secondary display. In terms of triggers, I have not detected any pattern yet. It is possible that Firefox has been running on all occasions, as I use that to access my email, calendar, task list, etc., and so have it running frequently.
I have investigated the issue, but have not found much helpful information. I have installed the AMD GPU drivers for Ubuntu 22.04, which I downloaded from the AMD site (https://www.amd.com/en/support/linux-drivers).
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, as it is difficult to use a machine that keeps randomly crashing on me.
Below is some hardware and system information that might be relevant.
0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ lshw -C video *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: /dev/fb0 version: c1 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi msix vga_controller bus_master cap_list fb configuration: depth=32 driver=amdgpu latency=0 mode=1366x768 resolution=1920,1080 visual=truecolor xres=1366 yres=768 resources: iomemory:7c0-7bf iomemory:7c0-7bf irq:46 memory:7ce0000000-7cefffffff memory:7cf0000000-7cf01fffff ioport:1000(size=256) memory:c0400000-c047ffff0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ lspci | grep VGA03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Device 1506 (rev c1)0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ lsb_release -aNo LSB modules are available.Distributor ID: UbuntuDescription: Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTSRelease: 22.04Codename: jammy0:1 napoletano@hp-lap:~ $ uname -aLinux hp-lap 6.5.0-27-generic #28~22.04.1-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Mar 15 10:51:06 UTC 2 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux