Ryzen 5 2400G Working Flawlessly on Mint 19.1

[Byke]

I've been trying to get 2400G to work for a couple weeks now and Linux Mint is my to-go system. I've read a lot about hardware and software requirements and I thought maybe some of my pieces weren't compatible.

General System Specs:

• 450W Corsair PSU CX 450
• 16GB DDR4 ram (2400 MHz overclocked on BIOS to 2933 MHz)
• ASUS Prime A320-A motherboard (<- the lowest you can go on budget, apparently. Woops.)
• Ryzen 5 2400G
• 1TB HDD 7200rpm

UPDATE: August, 21, 2019:
Use Mint 19.2 for appropriate support, since it comes with some of the updated packages necessary to make it not reset. Recommendations: Kernel version 5 and above, graphics drivers from the Padoka PPA, if needed for DXVK games or Steam Play/Proton.

Whenever something breaks, I just

Code: Select all

timeshift --restore

and pick an appropriate snapshot. I have a monthly, a weekly and a daily snapshot, just in case. If I can't login, the recovery mode allows you to fall to root terminal and apply the command!

CLARIFICATION: I didn't aim for "flawlessly" to be clickbait. The discussion in the posts from pages 1 to 3 occurred through a few weeks/months of its stumbling performance (Linux Mint's lack of native kernel 4.18.x support). On general heavy load (CPU) I put the machine to test, it worksfine:

• Native/SteamPlay games
• Audio recording
• Compiling big things (Wine?)
• Works on GNU/Octave running overnight (8+ hours)
• Synthetic stress tests

[whm1974]

I'm glad you are able to get the Ryzen 2400G to work with Mint 19. Looks like the support for those APUs is starting to shape up.

[whm1974]

Thanks for keeping us up to date on your Ryzen 2400G build.

[Byke]

Just wanted to let people know it's hanging "every now and then" when watching videos. I'm not sure if it's a codec problem or an application problem.

When I watch a lot of .mp4 videos offline, sometimes it will hang after 1 or 2 hours. Sometimes when skimming through Youtube videos or going in and out of fullscreen mode, it may also hang

I'm on kernel 4.17.9 right now.

Other than those occasional failures, gaming is fine. Steam is alright, moving large files is alright, etc etc.

[LinuxEnthusiast]

Just wanted to know how's the performance of Dota 2 on your machine. Any tweaks that you've made to your system or steam client apart from installing vulkan library?

[Byke]

Really funny how you made that question right now.

I moved from Kernel 4.17.11 to the latest stable 4.18.1 simply because with this hardware I feel like I need an up-to-date kernel. I don't plan on keep moving upwards too much, since my crashes have ceased in normal use.

Now... I did set up Dota 2 to play on Vulkan, but when I played it today, it was defaulted back to OpenGL with no Vulkan Support installed. I realized any option other than "fastest" on the graphics settings made my PC hang. It was not like other hangs, where the sound would keep looping like crazy. Dota 2 BGM was still playing, but everything (including the iconic Num Lock key on my keyboard) was irresponsive.

After trying to mess around with settings (and regressing to 4.17.11, for stability test's sake), I couldn't even add Animated Portraits without having the game crash (the whole computer). The interesting part is that the game only crashes when closing the menu, not when you toggle all the settings (and visualize them happening in real time behind the settings screen).

I could probably mess around more to find the culprit, but I'll leave that to another time. I blame Dota 2 more than Linux Mint on this one because I can play a lot of games under DXVK, and that uses Vulkan libraries to run things.

I can play a really sluggish 24fps 1080p on highest settings and 30ish fps cutting down antialising and some shaders/lighting.

EDIT: I can run Talos Principle, which has native Vulkan support, very well, giving me double the framerate of the OpenGL engine. This supports the idea that something is really bugged on Dota 2

Specs so far:
4.18.1 kernel
Mesa from Padoka repository (18.3 dev)
Vulkan 1.1.70
LLVM 7.0

Games tried under Wine/DXVK:
- Diablo 3
- Hearthstone
- Heroes of the Storm
- Magic: The Gathering - Arena
- Warframe
- Age of Empires III
- BlazBlue ChronoPhantasma

Native Games:
- Dota 2 (OpenGL is stable)
- Borderlands 2
- Dead Island (the most unoptimized broken game from the modern era)
- Enter the Gungeon
- Left 4 dead 2
- Middle-Earth: shadow of mordor
- Oxygen Not Included
- Team Fortress 2

[LinuxEnthusiast]

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply. DoTA 2 is stable on OpenGL you say? In my case it used to be very poor when I played via OpenGL, Vulkan had brought about some much needed stability but then an update came and all hell broke loose. Valve should really invest some more resources into developing games for us Linux users.

[richard-g8jvm]

hi
glad you are getting success,
I have the same CPU and a ASUS ROG B450-i Mobo
Running nicely on kernel 4.17, I'm not a gamer.
The only down point are the comments like you wont get answers to questions for running a non supported kernel
So at least there are two us now .
I got away with a 300w psu as I'musing a 240GB SSD.

[Byke]

Thanks a lot for your detailed reply. DoTA 2 is stable on OpenGL you say? In my case it used to be very poor when I played via OpenGL, Vulkan had brought about some much needed stability but then an update came and all hell broke loose. Valve should really invest some more resources into developing games for us Linux users.

Yeah, I feel like the same happened to me. I somehow think that was some kind of Vulkan update from their side, rather than a Linux update. It seems there's a dedicated git-hub for these kinds of dicussions, but since I'm quite absent from DotA and OpenGL runs acceptably, I'm not inclined to look into it right now.

hi
glad you are getting success,
I have the same CPU and a ASUS ROG B450-i Mobo
Running nicely on kernel 4.17, I'm not a gamer.
The only down point are the comments like you wont get answers to questions for running a non supported kernel
So at least there are two us now .
I got away with a 300w psu as I'musing a 240GB SSD.

Cheers! Your setup seems perfect for non-gaming stuff. 4.17.1x seems to be the sweet spot, since I had a bit of trouble in the earlier 4.17 kernels.

Every once in a while there seems to be some kind of combination of actions that make the system hang, specially with multimedia plugins and Firefox, but since they're rather rare with recent kernel updates, I don't have to debug them.

The last notable case was having a long firefox session open (1 tab) with a fully cached 1080p video and trying to compile a big executable (900+ files in the compile job). The pc was running 100%x8 and suddenly it froze. After I restarted and had firefox closed, the operation resumed alright.

I made this thread so that Ryzen 2 users can share their own (un)successful experiences, although our compatible kernels are not supported by Linux Mint ^^

[mattlach]

Good to see this.

I recently ordered some parts for my fiance for her new computer.

- Ryzen 5 2400G
- ASRock X470 Gaming-ITX/ac

She doesn't do games, but will have rather high expectations on video decoding and general desktop use working well.

It's been so long since I built anything with new hardware (my seven year old x79 Sandy-E Hexacore i7-3930k@4.8Ghz has given me no reason to upgrade yet) that I completely forgot to check on Linux compatibility before ordering (whoops).

My gut instinct was to check the good old Xorg RadeonFeature page I used to look at back when I had a set of Radeon 6970's back in 2011 and was constantly monitoring it for updates, but there isn't much there regarding Vega.

Just to be clear, would you mind doing a list of the PPA's and other patches you would recommend based on what you have learned thus far, if you were installing today?

[catweazel]

I made this thread so that Ryzen 2 users can share their own (un)successful experiences, although our compatible kernels are not supported by Linux Mint ^^

Seeing as you're messing around with kernels and are aware they're unsupported, you might want to see if you gain any benefit from a lowlatency kernel.

[Byke]

I made this thread so that Ryzen 2 users can share their own (un)successful experiences, although our compatible kernels are not supported by Linux Mint ^^

Seeing as you're messing around with kernels and are aware they're unsupported, you might want to see if you gain any benefit from a lowlatency kernel.

I am currently unaware about those, but I'm prizing stability in kernel features. Could you please reply with a link for more information? I'll be glad to read.

Just to be clear, would you mind doing a list of the PPA's and other patches you would recommend based on what you have learned thus far, if you were installing today?

For regular use, getting I simply downloaded Ukuu (Ubuntu Kernel Update Utility) and went for a stable kernel. 4.17.3 was the first "stable" kernel, but my system still hang every once in a while.

The newest 4.17.x should do just fine, at the moment, but I'm sticking with 4.18.5 right now because I'm going for gaming (newest drivers, etc)

Other than that, I updated my BIOS from the ASUS utility in a A320M motherboard, but I hardly think that was necessary for system stability (I had to either test that or use a release-candidate kernel a few months back).

I got an extra graphics PPA (Padoka) for the latest Mesa, LLVM, vulkan drivers etc, but I don't think you'll require those. The gaming scenario right now requires these bleeding edge libraries because of DXVK, which converts directx11 calls into Vulkan calls to use on Wine (Windows) programs.

If by video decoding you mean general video playback, it seems more than suitable for the job. I've seen a lot of benchmarks for games out there and the APU surely "packs a punch". It should have no trouble handling 4k video. If something goes wrong, I'd think it would be software related, because my comparisons from watching people play on DX11 and my personal experiences show that there's a huge gap when trying to use native windows programs. That said, video decoding is WAY more different than games, not using either DX11 or Vulkan, but I don't know about how codecs stand (VLC? Other media players?)

Cheers.

[Byke]

Just wanted to know how's the performance of Dota 2 on your machine. Any tweaks that you've made to your system or steam client apart from installing vulkan library?

I recently got new info and it appears Cinnamon has some bugs getting dota 2 vulkan to work. I don't intend to install a new Desktop Environment to test it, but this seems like a good lead.

[mattlach]

I made this thread so that Ryzen 2 users can share their own (un)successful experiences, although our compatible kernels are not supported by Linux Mint ^^

Seeing as you're messing around with kernels and are aware they're unsupported, you might want to see if you gain any benefit from a lowlatency kernel.

I am currently unaware about those, but I'm prizing stability in kernel features. Could you please reply with a link for more information? I'll be glad to read.

Just to be clear, would you mind doing a list of the PPA's and other patches you would recommend based on what you have learned thus far, if you were installing today?

For regular use, getting I simply downloaded Ukuu (Ubuntu Kernel Update Utility) and went for a stable kernel. 4.17.3 was the first "stable" kernel, but my system still hang every once in a while.

The newest 4.17.x should do just fine, at the moment, but I'm sticking with 4.18.5 right now because I'm going for gaming (newest drivers, etc)

Other than that, I updated my BIOS from the ASUS utility in a A320M motherboard, but I hardly think that was necessary for system stability (I had to either test that or use a release-candidate kernel a few months back).

I got an extra graphics PPA (Padoka) for the latest Mesa, LLVM, vulkan drivers etc, but I don't think you'll require those. The gaming scenario right now requires these bleeding edge libraries because of DXVK, which converts directx11 calls into Vulkan calls to use on Wine (Windows) programs.

If by video decoding you mean general video playback, it seems more than suitable for the job. I've seen a lot of benchmarks for games out there and the APU surely "packs a punch". It should have no trouble handling 4k video. If something goes wrong, I'd think it would be software related, because my comparisons from watching people play on DX11 and my personal experiences show that there's a huge gap when trying to use native windows programs. That said, video decoding is WAY more different than games, not using either DX11 or Vulkan, but I don't know about how codecs stand (VLC? Other media players?)

Cheers.

Thanks for this, it is very helpful.

I grabbed the latest Ubuntu mainline kernel (4.18) from the kernel PPA for mine and it seems to be working nicely.

I don't think I have have video decode acceleration though.

Don't get me wrong, video playback seems to work, but I get a not insignificant amount of CPU load when doing so. On my HTPC box running Kodi in linux with video playback I get next to no CPU load at all when playing back video files.

Here is CPU load before and after starting a 1080p H264 AVC encoded file:



I haven't used AMD GPU's in Linux in a long time. I used to always use Nvidias command line tools to verify this stuff. Is there some way I can see if hardware video decode is available?

I would have expected AMD to be using VAAPI, but when I run vainfo I only get this:

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$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.1.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: va_openDriver() returns -1
vaInitialize failed with error code -1 (unknown libva error),exit

Appreciate any info.

Maybe this would be better in its own thread though.

[Byke]

Hi, I'm glad you enjoyed the post.

When I do vainfo, it does give me information. I'm not sure if this is because I installed a lot of mesa/vulkan libraries (va/vdpau you name it)

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$ vainfo
libva info: VA-API version 1.1.0
libva info: va_getDriverName() returns 0
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/radeonsi_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_1
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 0
vainfo: VA-API version: 1.1 (libva 2.1.0)
vainfo: Driver version: Mesa Gallium driver 18.3.0-devel - padoka PPA for AMD RAVEN (DRM 3.26.0, 4.18.5-041805-generic, LLVM 8.0.0)
vainfo: Supported profile and entrypoints
      VAProfileMPEG2Simple            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileMPEG2Main              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Simple              :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Main                :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVC1Advanced            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264ConstrainedBaseline:	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264Main               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileH264High               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileHEVCMain               :	VAEntrypointEncSlice
      VAProfileHEVCMain10             :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile0            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileVP9Profile2            :	VAEntrypointVLD
      VAProfileNone                   :	VAEntrypointVideoProc

As you can see, I'm using drivers from this specific PPA.

Be warned though, I tried rolling back some versions or uninstalling "libwayland-client0 libwayland-server0 libwayland-cursor0" and it prompts the uninstallation of a lot of essential packages (gladly, Timeshift is there to save the day).

Those came from the oibaf PPA (where padoka gets his things from, but, as I later found out, WAY more "edgy" in the updates). When I tried following their instructions (oibaf/padoka) with ppa-purge, it is not very compatible with mint and the installation of some of these extra packages (like wayland) seem to break the system a lot. Here's a big list of things that would be uninstalled by uninstalling the 3 things mentioned before:

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The following packages will be REMOVED:
  apturl* apturl-common* baobab* blueberry* caribou* cinnamon* cinnamon-common* cinnamon-control-center*
  cinnamon-control-center-dbg* cinnamon-dbg* cinnamon-screensaver* cinnamon-screensaver-x-plugin* cinnamon-session*
  cinnamon-settings-daemon* cjs* evolution-data-server* ffmpeg* file-roller* firefox* freeglut3-dev* gcr* gdebi* gdebi-core*
  gimp-help-en* gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1* gir1.2-caribou-1.0* gir1.2-cinnamondesktop-3.0* gir1.2-clutter-1.0*
  gir1.2-clutter-gst-3.0* gir1.2-cogl-1.0* gir1.2-coglpango-1.0* gir1.2-gkbd-3.0* gir1.2-gnomebluetooth-1.0*
  gir1.2-gnomedesktop-3.0* gir1.2-gst-plugins-base-1.0* gir1.2-gtk-3.0* gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0* gir1.2-gtksource-3.0*
  gir1.2-keybinder-3.0* gir1.2-mate-desktop* gir1.2-mate-panel* gir1.2-matedesktop-2.0* gir1.2-matepanelapplet-4.0*
  gir1.2-meta-muffin-0.0* gir1.2-nemo-3.0* gir1.2-nmgtk-1.0* gir1.2-peas-1.0* gir1.2-rb-3.0* gir1.2-timezonemap-1.0*
  gir1.2-vte-2.91* gir1.2-webkit-3.0* gir1.2-webkit2-4.0* gir1.2-wnck-3.0* gir1.2-xapp-1.0* gir1.2-xplayer-1.0* gkbd-capplet*
  gnome-bluetooth* gnome-calculator* gnome-calendar* gnome-disk-utility* gnome-font-viewer* gnome-keyring* gnome-logs*
  gnome-online-accounts* gnome-orca* gnome-power-manager* gnome-screenshot* gnome-session-bin* gnome-session-canberra*
  gnome-settings-daemon* gnome-system-monitor* gnome-terminal* gstreamer1.0-clutter-3.0* gstreamer1.0-gl* gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad*
  gstreamer1.0-vaapi* gucharmap* gufw* libappindicator3-1* libavdevice57* libcanberra-gtk3-0* libcanberra-gtk3-module* libcaribou0*
  libchamplain-0.12-0* libchamplain-gtk-0.12-0* libcinnamon-control-center1* libcinnamon-desktop-dbg* libcinnamon-desktop4*
  libcjs-dbg* libcjs0f* libclutter-1.0-0* libclutter-gst-3.0-0* libclutter-gtk-1.0-0* libcogl-pango20* libcogl-path20* libcogl20*
  libcscreensaver0* libdazzle-1.0-0* libedataserverui-1.2-2* libegl-mesa0* libegl1* libegl1-mesa* libegl1-mesa-dev* libgail-3-0*
  libgbm1* libgcr-ui-3-1* libgdk3.0-cil* libgdk3.0-cil-dev* libgl1-mesa-dev* libgles2-mesa-dev* libglu1-mesa-dev* libglvnd-dev*
  libgnome-bluetooth13* libgnome-desktop-3-17* libgnomekbd8* libgoa-backend-1.0-1* libgspell-1-1* libgstreamer-gl1.0-0*
  libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev* libgtk-3-0* libgtk-3-bin* libgtk3-perl* libgtk3.0-cil* libgtk3.0-cil-dev* libgtkmm-3.0-1v5*
  libgtksourceview-3.0-1* libgucharmap-2-90-7* libgweather-3-15* libindicator3-7* libkeybinder-3.0-0* libmate-desktop-2-17*
  libmate-panel-applet-4-1* libmateweather1* libmetacity1* libmuffin0* libnautilus-extension1a* libnemo-extension1* libnm-gtk0*
  libnma0* libpeas-1.0-0* libpeas-1.0-python2loader* libpoppler-qt5-1* libqt5gui5* libqt5printsupport5* libqt5svg5* libqt5widgets5*
  libqt5x11extras5* libreoffice-avmedia-backend-gstreamer* libreoffice-gnome* libreoffice-gtk3* librhythmbox-core10* librsvg2-bin*
  libsdl2-2.0-0* libtimezonemap1* libva-wayland2* libvte-2.91-0* libwayland-client0* libwayland-cursor0* libwayland-dev*
  libwayland-server0* libwebkit2gtk-4.0-37* libwebkitgtk-3.0-0* libwnck-3-0* libwxgtk3.0-dev* libxapp1* libxplayer0*
  libxreaderdocument3* libxreaderview3* libyelp0* lutris* mate-desktop* mate-panel* mate-polkit* mesa-utils-extra*
  mesa-vulkan-drivers* metacity* mint-common* mint-meta-cinnamon* mint-meta-codecs* mint-meta-core* mintbackup* mintdrivers*
  mintinstall* mintlocale* mintmenu* mintreport* mintsources* mintstick* mintsystem* mintupdate* mintwelcome* mousetweaks* mozo*
  muffin* muffin-dbg* nemo* nemo-dbg* nemo-emblems* nemo-fileroller* nemo-preview* nemo-share* network-manager-gnome*
  network-manager-openvpn-gnome* network-manager-pptp-gnome* nvidia-prime-applet* onboard* orca* pavucontrol* pinentry-gnome3* pix*
  pix-dbg* policykit-1-gnome* psensor* python-nemo* python3-aptdaemon.gtk3widgets* qbittorrent* qjackctl* qt5-gtk-platformtheme*
  qt5-style-plugins* qt5ct* redshift-gtk* rhythmbox* rhythmbox-plugin-tray-icon* rhythmbox-plugins* seahorse* simple-scan*
  slick-greeter* ssh-askpass-gnome* synaptic* system-config-printer* system-config-printer-common* system-config-printer-gnome*
  texstudio* timeshift* ubuntu-system-adjustments* ukuu* vainfo* vino* vlc* vlc-plugin-notify* vlc-plugin-qt*
  vlc-plugin-video-output* xdg-desktop-portal-gtk* xdg-user-dirs-gtk* xed* xed-dbg* xorg* xplayer* xplayer-dbg* xplayer-plugins*
  xreader* xreader-dbg* xserver-xorg* xserver-xorg-core* xserver-xorg-input-all* xserver-xorg-input-libinput*
  xserver-xorg-input-wacom* xserver-xorg-video-all* xserver-xorg-video-amdgpu* xserver-xorg-video-ati* xserver-xorg-video-fbdev*
  xserver-xorg-video-intel* xserver-xorg-video-mach64* xserver-xorg-video-nouveau* xserver-xorg-video-qxl* xserver-xorg-video-r128*
  xserver-xorg-video-radeon* xserver-xorg-video-vesa* xserver-xorg-video-vmware* xviewer* xviewer-dbg* xviewer-plugins* xwayland*
  yelp* zenity*
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  mintsources mint-common (due to mintsources) gir1.2-gtk-3.0 (due to mintsources) gir1.2-vte-2.91 (due to mintsources)

If I had more time and expertise in getting the proper mesa tools, I'd be compiling all this by myself, on git, and probably have way better package control.

[thatvirtualboy]

Glad to see this post. Turns out LM19 and Ubuntu 18.04 just aren't compatible with my BIOS (older FM2+ mobo) which I have an AMD A10 6800k APU installed on. Been toying with the idea of upgrading the system.

I love the idea of APUs, and have been impressed with my 6800k, but I want to ensure whatever I upgrade to can be supported out of the box.

[Byke]

Glad to see this post. Turns out LM19 and Ubuntu 18.04 just aren't compatible with my BIOS (older FM2+ mobo) which I have an AMD A10 6800k APU installed on. Been toying with the idea of upgrading the system.

I love the idea of APUs, and have been impressed with my 6800k, but I want to ensure whatever I upgrade to can be supported out of the box.

Thanks! This APU surely "packs a punch". It feels like the only upgrades I need right now is dual channel RAM (1x8GB currently) and new drivers/supporting software.

For generic use, it feels really good standing on kernel 4.17.19, and gaming, although not achieving 100% native performance, is still very good!

Although these things didn't come out of the box, simply updating the kernel to that stable version seems to solve a lot of the release problems, and that can be easily done on both Ubuntu and LM 19. If one wants to get "the bleeding edge" right out of the box, maybe Fedora Rawhide or OpenSuSE could be more useful.

[thatvirtualboy]

Glad to see this post. Turns out LM19 and Ubuntu 18.04 just aren't compatible with my BIOS (older FM2+ mobo) which I have an AMD A10 6800k APU installed on. Been toying with the idea of upgrading the system.

I love the idea of APUs, and have been impressed with my 6800k, but I want to ensure whatever I upgrade to can be supported out of the box.

Thanks! This APU surely "packs a punch". It feels like the only upgrades I need right now is dual channel RAM (1x8GB currently) and new drivers/supporting software.

For generic use, it feels really good standing on kernel 4.17.19, and gaming, although not achieving 100% native performance, is still very good!

Although these things didn't come out of the box, simply updating the kernel to that stable version seems to solve a lot of the release problems, and that can be easily done on both Ubuntu and LM 19. If one wants to get "the bleeding edge" right out of the box, maybe Fedora Rawhide or OpenSuSE could be more useful.

Bleh. Nah I'll stick with LM =)

[mattlach]

Figured I'd update here.

I was having random freezes on my Fiance's build.

First I tried the newest mainline kernel from the UBuntu PPA, but that gave me all sorts of problems.

Then in another thread, user gm10 suggested instead using the kernel in the Ubuntu cosmic-proposed repo, as it has had patches applied to it and may be more stable.

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echo 'deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ cosmic-proposed main restricted multiverse universe' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/cosmic-proposed.list
printf "Package: *\nPin: release a=cosmic-proposed\nPin-Priority: 400" | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/cosmic-proposed.pref
apt update

Then find the 4.18 kernel via Update Manager > View > Linux kernels > 4.18, click on the latest version and click Install.

The first part adds the repository, the second part gives it a lower priority, so your system doesn't pull in a ton of beta Ubuntu packages, only the one you tell it to, in this case, the kernel.

At first, with the cosmic proposed 4.18.0-7 kernel, things were much improved above the mainline, but I still had random freezes.

Yesterday, I upgraded it to the cosmic-proposed 4.18.0-8 kernel, and it hasn't frozen yet.

It hasn't been long enough to say for sure that the issue is completely gone, but it is definitely much better than it was.

Figured I'd share just in case it helps anyone else.

[Byke]

Thanks for your input!

Your solutions seems quite more elegant than mine, but I won't trade at this point. Instead of adding kernels to the update manager or to my source lists, I'm simply using Ukuu (Ubuntu Kernel Update Utility). Instead of going all the way to 4.18, I stuck to 4.17.19-041719-generic from Ukuu, for the time being.

The only moment I notice any hangs right now are random Firefox hiccups. For example, just today, I logged into winehq's appdb and as soon as I tried moving my screen with the successful login notice there, everything froze (I wonder why).

Some friends suggested a good "bulletproof -- never EVER freeze again" solution is to put two boot options in /etc/default/grub or by using grub-customizer

pcie_aspm=off idle=nomwait

I haven't tried them because the "failure rate" of my system is already acceptable, but you may want to take note of that somewhere (like I did) to maybe save you some further trouble.