System crash and reset apps pinned to panel

[eotfofiw]

First time installing Mint on this laptop - it's a Lenovo X1 Extreme 2nd gen and has been the first laptop I've had so many problems with when it comes to Linux. This seems to stem mainly from the Intel/Nvidia hydrib setup. Some distros play reasonably nicely, some not at all.

When I heard Linux Mint (and cinnamon) now have scaling set up that will let me have the hidpi laptop screen working with a lodpi external display, I thought I'd give it a go.

Mint comes with a nice installer for Nvidia drivers like Ubuntu does, so that was a great start! Up and running in no time. Fiddling with the scaling setup in the display settings (which is a little less intuitive than I'd like, but when I finally had a working display setup, I looked at the settings and thought "ah yeah ok, that actually makes sense".

Now I needed to install the software I would be using for work: vscode, slack, zoom... all in the software app (and all of them flatpaks). I don't usually use the flatpaks, but if that's the road Mint is taking me down, let's install those and see how it works.

---

I'd been on a zoom call for about an hour and the system froze. No mouse, no sound, no keyboard... nothing. Usually I would resort to getting to one of the other tty's and `sudo pkill X` to get myself out of a mess like that but I couldn't do anything.

So I just hard rebooted the machine. Logged back in and all the apps I had opened and pinned to the panel were gone. Firefox (which I had removed from the panel) was back. It looks like everything I had set up was gone.

The applications were still installed, just not on the panel I had pinned them to. I was back with a fresh installed desktop panel.

What happened?

I looked around and found "system reports". The crash reports section is totally empty. I was looking through the other logs and couldn't see anything that stood out as a "everything is on fire!" type message.

So I was hoping to ask on here:

Are there issues with the setup I have and Flatpaks? Are flatpaks likely to be the cause?
If this were to happen again, where would be the best place to find the reason behind such a crash?
I've since removed all the flatpaks and installed their respective .deb's from their different websites and all seems to be ok - that doesn't mean it was definitely a flatpak issue... but I've had no issues with Zoom since then and it's been open for similar lengths of time.

[1000]

I don't use flatpak so I don't know.
Here you have an example topic, how he studied his own problem in small steps, how he viewed the logs.
Review the entire topic. Because sometimes is good to learn from the mistakes of others.
viewtopic.php?f=47&t=327105