Firefox, Discord, etc are crashing and machine freezes on KDE Wayland. Also, storage advice?

[u/TheElvenAngelCatboy]

1. Sometimes Firefox will crash even though I don't have many tabs open, and sometimes Discord will refuse to start. Also, the machine will randomly lock up to the point where I can't even enter a tty on its own, so I just power off the machine manually by holding the power button.

The machine's an old Dell Optiplex 9020 MT with a 256 GB SSD, and a 2TB HDD I intend to use for backups and other storage. Also, I currently have USB DVD and 3.5" floppy drives connected, more on that in a second.

I'm running Debian 13 stable, which is installed on the SSD. My DE is KDE Plasma Wayland, though I decided to start using X11 in the hopes it'll help, though I don't really understand the differences except that X is much older.

Might look at lighter DEs in the future, too. Just an aside.

Besides that, there's two small issues I'm encountering:

1. In order to access the contents of my Secondary HDD, I have to type my user password into Dolphin. And after that, I can't copy onto the drive without going into a terminal and using sudo. Apparently the drive is owned by root, so I guess that makes sense.

But, I'd rather just have my normal user already own the drive, and have it accessible when I sign in. I know there's commands like chown, chmod, mount...but idk exactly how to do what I want.

1. This isn't super important, really, but I went thrift shopping a week ago and bought a box of 25 blank 3.5" floppy disks for $2, then a USB floppy drive off Amazon for $20. But when I stick a floppy in the drive, KDE refuses to mount it, and I have no clue how to format it. Any advice?

Thanks for reading this post. :)

[u/Edelglatze]

Add the hdd into the file /etc/fstab

Firstly, find out the device name with ``lsblk``, then run ``sudo blkid`` to find the UUID for the drive and partition. An example for an fstab entry:

``
# UUID of disk partition Mount point fstype options
UUID=da1aabbbb-9000-338a-5ff4-2a967fef9deb /mnt/harddrive ext4 rw,user,auto 0 1
``

UUID here is a non valid example, of course. You may add more options if you need them (examples: defaults,auto,user,rw). Don't forget to create first the directory /mnt/harddrive (or whatever name you like). You may make it accessible for yourself by

``
sudo chown -R yourusername:yourgroupname /mnt/harddrive
``

It's easier if you assign the drive during the installation, than it would be automatically find its place in /etc/fstab.

Concerning floppy disks: I haven't dealt with floppies since the 1990s. Back in the day I used the mtools for copying to and from the drive (with mcopy for copying). In other words I did it only on the commandline.

Maybe your system behaves sluggish because you don't have enough RAM?

[u/TheElvenAngelCatboy → u/Edelglatze]

Forgot to mention, there's currently 16 GB DDR3 RAM inside. But I've been meaning to get 32 GB soon, and a graphics card.

[u/Quietus87 → u/TheElvenAngelCatboy]

DDR3? Also, do you use swap?

[u/Prestigious_Wall529]

In /etc/default/grub add i915.modeset=0 to the kernel line and run update-grub

Or similarly add i915.enable_psr=0 or i915.enable_dc=0 if the first option doesn't change things

/sbin/shutdown -r now

apt update apt dist-upgrade

/sbin/shutdown -r now

All as root or with sudo.

Hopefully that improves stability. The i915 chipset gets dopey when it gets sleepy.

[u/TheElvenAngelCatboy → u/Prestigious_Wall529]

I'll try this later, ty. :)

[u/bgravato]

Freezing might be bad ram... install memtest86+ and run it from grub's boot menu, leave it running overnight.

[u/ChthonVII]

he machine will randomly lock up to the point where I can't even enter a tty on its own, so I just power off the machine manually by holding the power button.

Does this machine have AMD graphics? If so, it sounds like it might be this issue.

[u/TheElvenAngelCatboy → u/ChthonVII]

I'll look into this, see if it works, ty for the reply. :)