Everything on my desktop crashes/exits when I exit certain apps - how to troubleshoot this?

General system Newbie
1

Obviously I need to find some logs to read, but honestly I’m not sure what logs I should even be looking at.

It first started with lutris - would try to boot a game, and it would crash - not just lutris, but EVERYTHING I was running (firefox, discord, terminals, etc). But ocasionally after lutris crashes, I can try again and it opens just fine. I play some games, but when I exit the game – Same thing. EVERYTHING crashes. So I thought this was related to lutris - did some troubleshooting in the form of updating everything, reinstalling winetricks, etc. Still happens.

But now I’ve realized that it happens when I exit discord. Not when I start it, but when I close the app (mod+q). Same story - EVERYTHING crashes.

I’m using KDE plasma (wayland). And everything was going pretty well for a few months, but this recently started happening - 2 weeks ago? I have a feeling this is related to wayland or xorg sessions somehow, and I tried booting into a Plasma environment with X11, but it doesn’t even work - I can’t see any apps, and most of my screen is grey and flickering with ghost windows min/maxing the whole time. I’m guessing I don’t have all the dependencies to run X11 sessions, but that was by design. I wanted to go full in on Wayland. I’ve got almost the exact same setup on my lenovo x1carbon laptop, and it’s got way weaker hardware than my desktop, so I’m guessing it’s not related to that?

What do I need to start digging into in order to get some clues? Thanks everyone in advance, I love this community.

EDIT - I wasn’t sure where to post this, so if it’s wrong, feel free to move it!

2

While I have no concrete suggestions on how to debug your problem, I can confirm that on occasion I have had similar crashes with games. Most of the time it’s from Lutris. My idea is that the windows devices somehow get a low level access that prevents Linux from coming back normally (no switching using Alt+F2 to F7).

I can also say that since switching to an AMD video card I had none of those. So if that is a possibility try a different NVidia driver (isn’t there a stable one?), or stick with X11, as NVidia on Wayland can still be a little shaky.

If you have such a crash reboot and look through the system logs from the previous boot, or maybe configure logging for your wine prefix and after reboot read those, maybe there’s an error message that is googleable.

3

Thanks for the reply. I realize now I didn’t mention any of my computer details! I too am using AMD video card, Ryzen processor. I am starting to think this isn’t directly related to lutris or gaming at all. Because now the best way to reproduce the error is to just launch discord (confirmed it is running in xwayland), then close discord. it crashes everything EXCEPT system stuff. I had system monitor open, and another settings menu open on my last try, and it only crashed my firefox, and discord.

4

If it’s Discord you crash, start it from a command line and read whatever is printed there, maybe you’ll find a reason or an error message.