MX16 had a big batch of system updates recently after being quiet for some time. The next day I had all sorts of weird errors. Not sure if it had anything to do with the updates, as I had also been futzing about trying to install MX17 on a flash drive and messing with GRUB etc at the same time.

[Aside: As I think I've mentioned before, each succeeding version of MX Linux has been much better than the previous one. I've really been extremely impressed with this OS. MX15 was unusable for me for a few reasons. MX 16 worked well enough for me to use it as my primary. And MX 17 has been practically flawless - I enjoy it so much it's ridiculous!!! :)]

Anyway the computer was having difficulty shutting down and complaining about horrifying things like segfaults and mysqld refusing to stop. And swap not deactivating properly, which happens a lot. I think I borked the original partitioning and installation for this PC (MX 16) so its been weird ever since. Probably doesn't help that it has to share space with Windows, which keeps trying to take over and reset the BIOS to boot to Windows All The Time whenever I have to use it (fortunately not very often).


At about the same period CopyQ started crashing (since the v3.3.0 update), Horst Reminder started crashing at startup (Play on Linux), and various other random gremlins also kicked in. Not going to bother listing all of them but some are still ongoing and some are not.

Right now CopyQ is still crashing - I reverted it to an older version, then later re-updated it - no difference, still crashing. Which is a minor pain since it's very convenient for holding all kinds of handy snippets and things.

I dug out many old copies of Horst Reminder (it appeared to be some kind of wine related issue, maybe) and switched them around to test. Also re-installed various wine-related components using both synaptic and MX package installer (not at the same time, of course ;) The re-installs didn't seem to help much; Reminder continued to crash. Finally I found a very old copy with a 2014 executable, version 3.26.1, and I plonked this into the 64 bit PoL drive. It is the only one that has loaded and not crashed so far.

I also tried the same executable in a 32 bit PoL drive, and it worked even better. The 64 bit drive copy loaded with messed up icons, but that's not a big deal. The 32 bit copy loads with proper icons looking the way they should, so I'm switching over to that for now. Both copies load with an apparently black screen, but this is an easy fix - just go into the options and change the background color to white, and voila, everything shows back up normally and visibly again :)

Xpad also starting acting strangely - it takes a noticeable few seconds for the screen display to catch up when typing in it. It used to be very fast. I'm not sure what happened there. I switched back to XFCE Notes and that seems to be working normally and very quickly, as fast as xpad used to be. (Notes used to be the slightly slower one!)

A couple of other issues turned out to be easily fixed - they were fine after a reboot and simply never reappeared :) After much BIOS-resetting (as usual) I was also finally able to get the computer to go back to booting Linux by default again, instead of kicking back to Windows.

Lastly Vivaldi has also been acting up since the last one or two updates. It now crashes randomly during file downloads, which is most annoying and inconvenient if you're (a) in the middle of a lot of downloads or (b) have a lot of tabs open. For (b), fortunately, you can usually click on the trashcan icon at the top and tell it to reload all the lost tabs after you restart the browser, but sometimes it doesn't seem to remember all the tabs.

Also, if you only reopen some of the tabs, be careful! Sometimes after you reopen a few tabs from the trashcan, the remaining tabs disappear from the recycle list and you can't get them back!

Sadly I didn't keep a copy of the previous deb file. I used to do this with Firefox since every alternate FF update used to be a bad one :) I had just started to feel comfortable and pretty happy with Vivaldi updates as they always seemed to work out well and I never had any trouble after an update. This is the first time I've noticed an issue annoying enough to actually bug me, no pun intended! :)

Part of the annoyance is that it actually happens quite often. It's also random and unpredictable - I still haven't figured out what might be setting it off. It has to do with downloads because that's the only time it happens - during a download - but many downloads complete with no problems, and I haven't yet noticed a specific pattern as to what types of files cause this (so far it seems to be all kinds!).

I'm hoping an update will come out soon, otherwise I'll have to go and try to hunt out an older version to re-install for now.


tags: crashes, bugs, Vivaldi, CopyQ, xpad, Horst Reminder, MXlinux