Ubuntu 16.04 screen completely freezes only mouse moves - crash

Question

Ever since I have upgraded my laptop (Click here for hardware specs.) my screen usually freezes. Mostly in chrome or Firefox browser. I am pretty sure this is a Nvidia driver problem but I can't seem to find the solution. I am running a Nvidia Quadro K2100M.
I am currently running Nvidia 361.42. I have tried using open source Xorg server without any luck.
The only solution I have found so far is forcefully turning off the computer by holding down the power button.
Things that I have tried:
I got keyboard input
I cannot switch to another terminal to restart lightdm

Answer 1

This problem came to me occasionally, making me really annoyed.
As illustrated in many blogs, this may be caused by graphic driver problem. For me, my desktop has a NVIDIA video card, you can run lspci | grep VGA to see what type of your video type, in my case, it returned:
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 8400 GS Rev. 2] (rev a1)
I followed the instruction on jiakai zhang's blog to reinstall proper drivers for the desktop, hope this will help you.
The key steps in [1] are to reinstall the ubuntu desktop and nvidia drivier by:
$ sudo su
$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
$ apt-get install unity
$ apt-get remove --purge nvidia*
$ reboot
$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current
$ sudo reboot

Answer 2

Updating the grub settings worked for me! Do the following:
1. Open the GRUB configuration
sudo vi /etc/default/grub
2. Change the value of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT from "quiet splash" to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash intel_idle.max_cstate=1"
and save the file.
3. Update & Reboot
sudo update-grub
sudo reboot
More info:
This is a bug in the processor, known as the c-state bug. It causes total freezes when the CPU tries to enter an unsupported sleep state. It's a problem for many Bay Trail devices especially with newer (4.*) kernels. There is a simple workaround until it gets properly fixed upstream. You just need to pass a kernel boot parameter and the random freezing stops completely. The parameter may increase battery consumption slightly, but it will give you a usable system. You do this by editing the configuration file for GRUB as described above.
GRUB - boot loader package from the GNU Project, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems
installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular operating system's partitions;
Intel Bay Trail - new Atom Processors from Intel. Atom is Intel's family of x86 and x86-64 processors that are optimized
for small computing devices, such as smartphones and mobile Internet devices;
C-States - used to optimize optimize or reduce power consumption in idle mode (i. e. when no code is executed) - (C0 to C8)
Reference: here.

Answer 3

I have since fixed this problem by re-installing Ubuntu 16.04 and not switching from the nouveau video driver. I also disable updates and everything been working good for about 2 months now.
Gaming is pretty good but I usually play steam games so doesn't push any kinda hard core graphics

Answer 4

Well, I had the same problem: My PC was freezing randomly. I tried Ubuntu 16, 17 and 18.04 and everything was the same. I tried several drivers and didn't get a solution. I tried several solutions that I found in the forums (including this) and got bad and harmful results.
My solution was: I stopped using the graphical nvidia card, removed it and now I'm using the integrated Intel HD graphics card (Intel® HD Graphics 530 card (Skylake GT2)) and all the problems were solved!

Answer 5

I fixed mine using a few commands from #Qoros solution above. i just ran apt-get update, apt-get install nvidia-current, and sudo reboot. cheers to #Qoros btw!

Answer 6

For me, none of the approaches described in rest of the answers worked.
I was opening multiple terminal tabs running some heavy processes and ubuntu used to freeze when I had 6-7 tabs. I tried monitoring the resources used while I was starting my processes in terminal tabs. You can do it by opening System Monitor app and going to Resources tab.
What I noticed is that when my RAM(8GB) and my swap space(1GB) were completely used up, ubuntu would freeze.
As a solution, I increased my swap space and made it 16GB. After this memory never gets used completely and ubuntu doesn't freeze.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/178712/how-to-increase-swap-space decsibes how to increase swap space.