Michal Tomaszuk's questions

I have scoured both Askubuntu as well other sites for this and haven't found anything substantial, so I hope it's not too much of a duplicate.

In any case, I've been lately experiencing random freezes - the system locks up completely, my keyboard and mouse do not respond, the PC also disappears from active network clients (by scanning my network with nmap from a different PC) so I assume it dies completely instead of just losing the inputs. It started happening recently, after upgrading to 19.04.

I haven't been able to pinpoint the problem, and the only common denominator seems to be Chrome. However, even then there's a huge window of variation, as I can be doing anything from watching YT to just reading Latex formatting tips, so anything from high to low load. I have GPU acceleration and other experimental goodies turned off, so I don't think it's that - besides, I never had such problems before 19.04.

The following comes up in /var/log/syslog just before the freeze:

Sep 25 12:31:08 meeshbox systemd[1]: Started Run anacron jobs.
Sep 25 12:31:08 meeshbox anacron[11822]: Anacron 2.3 started on 2019-09-25
Sep 25 12:31:08 meeshbox anacron[11822]: Normal exit (0 jobs run)
Sep 25 12:31:08 meeshbox systemd[1]: anacron.service: Succeeded.
Sep 25 12:31:32 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3802c74 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 214748364
7; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:31:32 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3802c74 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 214748364
7; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:36:28 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: [1:1:0925/123628.789445:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a respo
nse.
Sep 25 12:36:28 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: [1:1:0925/123628.791155:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a respo
nse.
Sep 25 12:36:45 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x38039d7 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 214748364
7; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:36:45 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x38039d7 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 214748364
7; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:08 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803b5a sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 214748364
7; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:08 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803b5a sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:26 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803bc3 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:26 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803bc3 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:40 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803c21 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:40 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803c21 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:41 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803c35 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:41 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803c35 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:42 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803c49 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:42 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803c49 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:51 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803ca1 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:38:51 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803ca1 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:39:02 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803d01 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:39:02 meeshbox org.gnome.Shell.desktop[1329]: Window manager warning: Window 0x3803d01 sets an MWM hint indicating it isn't resizable, but sets min size 1 x 1 and max size 2147483647 x 2147483647; this doesn't make much sense.
Sep 25 12:40:09 meeshbox smartd[910]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel changed from 68 to 67
Sep 25 12:40:09 meeshbox smartd[910]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 32 to 33
Sep 25 12:41:14 meeshbox systemd-resolved[803]: Server returned error NXDOMAIN, mitigating potential DNS violation DVE-2018-0001, retrying transaction with reduced feature level UDP.

Nothing of interest in kern.log. Never had this problem with 18.04. It's not very common, but quite irritating once it happens - for example now, I lost a pretty substantial chunk of code I was writing, as I was dumb enough not to save it. It also never happened when, for example, playing games, even with other stuff in the background. I cannot really pinpoint it properly. However, scouring logs from the last week for when the freezes happened, I found that lines like this:

[1:1:0925/123628.789445:ERROR:child_process_sandbox_support_impl_linux.cc(81)] FontService unique font name matching request did not receive a response.

are often seen shortly before a freeze - but not immediately before it, more like 3-4 minutes.

What other logs can be relevant to check?

my first post here.

I am running 18.04.1 and I have recently gotten an error while booting - the screen remains black after POST and nothing happens. I went into recovery mode and found that my root partition doesn't get mounted due to orphaned inodes and the like - I cannot supply a log since I have rebooted twice since fixing that and I do not actually know how to access historical boot logs. I could fix it by running fsck.ext4 -p /dev/mapper/name-of-root-partition, and everything is fine and dandy again... However, I know this will probably happen again in the future, as I have had the exact same problem with Debian - it was in fact one of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu (the other being worse compatibility on Debian and some other small problems I didn't feel like fixing by hand, on Ubuntu it just werks).

Now fixing the problem is easy and rather pain-free, but I wonder what could be the reason, as it happens fairly frequently (I reckon twice a week) - I realized it might have something to do with me shutting the computer down with sudo shutdown now. Am I on the right track? I could not find any proper information about this approach being "dangerous" but at the same time everybody seems to be inputting various arguments before now, never running it "raw".

My hardware is pretty generic and I would assume rather unimportant, really. I have a single Kingston SSD and the weirdest thing in my setup is probably me forcing the kernel to load amdgpu instead of the default radeon drivers.