Brave randomly freezes / hangs on Fedora Linux

Brave Browser Desktop Support
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1

Description of the issue:

Brave is freezing at random times. It seems to be related to encryption, but I’m not sure. For the latest incident, I was in Proton Mail and doing some work to set up a new user account in my domain. In other incidents, it seems to happen more frequently if another app that uses a lot of encryption is running, e.g. Thunderbird. I looked in brave://crashes and nothing is there. The only way out of the hang is to kill all the Brave processes, e.g.,

kill `ps -ef | grep brave | awk '{print $2}'

How can this issue be reproduced?

While these hangs are frequent (at least once a day), I have not found a way to produce them. I do tend to keep a lot of tabs active – more than a dozen, in the latest hang. Can I send a signal with kill to tell it to generate a crash report?

Expected result:

I expect it to keep running rather than freezing with nowhere to go.

Brave Version( check About Brave):

Brave 1.87.192 (Official Build) (64-bit)

Chromium: 145.0.7632.160

Additional Information:

System Details Report

Report details

  • Date generated: 2026-03-10 13:30:30

Hardware Information:

  • Hardware Model: Dell Inc. Inspiron 3475 AIO
  • Memory: 8.0 GiB
  • Processor: AMD A9-9425 RADEON R5, 5 COMPUTE CORES 2C+3G × 2
  • Graphics: AMD Radeon™ R5 Graphics
  • Disk Capacity: 1.0 TB

Software Information:

  • Firmware Version: 1.9.2
  • OS Name: Fedora Linux 43 (Workstation Edition)
  • OS Build: (null)
  • OS Type: 64-bit
  • GNOME Version: 49
  • Windowing System: Wayland
  • Kernel Version: Linux 6.18.10-200.fc43.x86_64
2

Quick followup. I just experienced the subject behavior again, but this time only one Brave window was frozen, along with all its associated tabs. Another window and its tabs were navigable. I see a similar report in GitGub from last December. That one appears to have been the underlying Chromium engine, but I’m not sure they are related.

3

@SamScott can you share the crash report ID as well? Can be found at Brave://crashes.

Does disabling graphics acceleration help at all?

4

Odd. I would swear that yesterday I saw no crash reports at all. Today I see two, but they are both more than a month old. Both are marked as unsent. Sending anyway, however I don’t think they will be relevant to the issue at hand.

Nonetheless, I’m now suspecting something external to Brave. When I sat down today, everything was slow. Looking at top, I saw that packagekitd was burning my processor. It’s apparently part of Gnome, which I’m growing suspicious of, and that it is apparently redundant if you run dnf update periodically. Since I whacked the packagekitd and disabled the service, the system seems to be running better. We’ll see….