Blender crashes OS while in Shading tab or using viewport shading material preview

Question

I have a problem with Blender in Linux and maybe someone could give me an idea on how to fix it:

In the Layout tab with viewport shading active or in the Shading tab, when I try to grab and pull the line between the windows to change the size, it crashes my whole PC. If I try to resize any window the system crashes and the GPU fans start to spin really fast and noisy and don't stop until I shut it down. The moment I reproduce the crash the system shuts down instantly and only the GPU fans spin fast and noisy. I have to press the power button for a few seconds to turn it off completely. Couldn't find other means to force Blender to crash, to see if a crash log is written somewhere (usually in /tmp folder).

This happens all the time but only with viewport shading material preview active or when I use the Shading tab. In Layout, Modeling, Sculpting, UV Editing, tabs i can create new windows and I can resize them, no problem as long as I don't activate material preview.

I managed to reproduce the same crash by doing exactly the same things running different Linux Mint versions (19.3 20.1), Majaro 21.06, Ubuntu 20.04, Elementary OS and Open Suse Tumbleweed, with different kernels and different NVIDIA drivers, newer, older or recommended (installed from the distros repos or from the NVIDIA web page) and with different blender versions (2.82 2.91 2.92 2.93, etc). It doesn't matter if the render engine is Eevee or Cycles.

Operating systems tested: Linux Mint 19.3, Linux Mint 20.1, Manjaro Gnome 21.06, Ubuntu 20.04, Elementary OS, Open SUSE Tumbleweed

Graphics card: Geeforce GTX 1660

CPU: Intel I7 7440 RAM: 16GB DDR3

Motherboard H81M-K

At this moment, I am using Manjaro and Windows 10 dual boot on separate ssd-s. In windows everything works fine.

Please help!

Answer 1

NOTE: Please include where you are installing Blender from, if it is from Steam, the Blender website (.tar.xz), or from snap, right now, I have no idea! Steam is not ideal for Linux OS!

I am using Windows 10/Linux dual boot from seperate SSDs as well. Resizing the window works fine on Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS, since 20.04 is a fairly new operating system try downgrading and installing Blender using snap.

Mini Guide to installing via snap

sudo apt update

Then execute:

sudo apt upgrade

And after that...

sudo apt install snapd

If you do want to check if snap is working, install Hello World! from Canonical:

sudo snap install hello-world

This should output:

hello-world 6.4 from Canonical✓ installed

Now execute:

hello-world

This should output:

Hello World!

If this works, snap is successfully installed! Now:

sudo snap install blender --classic

Try opening Blender now. (Rememeber! Only install one Blender, from the snap store.)