I use an ASUS X553MA running on Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS. I've been experiencing more and more frequent freezes - the laptop would freeze in the middle of the action for an indefinite amount of time and would require a hard reset for everything to go back to normal. The entire visual component would go dormant with no hint of recovery, including the cursor. uname -r gives 5.19.0-46-generic.
The laptop first froze as I was scrolling through a large .PDF textbook with quite complex illustrations, so I thought it might have been the PDF itself. Later on, even tamer PDFs would cause it to freeze, and today even a simple Google search did the trick. The laptop is indeed quite old but not unacceptably so, so I expect it to handle PDFs and simple searches free of problems. The swapfile has a reasonable size of 4.2 GB (and overall the disk space is barely occupied):
Things I have tried so far:
- rebooting many times;
- clearing the apt cache with
sudo apt-get clean --dry-run; - freeing some space/cleaning residual files with
sudo apt-get autoremoveandsudo apt-get autoclean, as well as cleaning thumbnail cache and uninstalling apps I almost never use; - updating/upgrading everything with
sudo apt-get updateandsudo apt-get upgrade- everything is up-to-date; - switch to Xorg. (no freezing yet, unsure whether the problem was solved)
At this stage, the usability of the laptop is quite a gamble which makes the whole situation very frustrating. Let me know if there are any additional resources I could provide you with (such as crash logs) for the resolution of this problem.