Yesterday I put an SSD drive into my 2013 laptop, an Acer Aspire V5-551 which originally came with Windows 8. I decided on Ubuntu Mate 16.04 for the new operating system (before that, I had been running Windows 10 with quite some issues -- e.g. the internal wifi chip did not work, I had to use an external dongle).
Expecting the best, after I finished the installation, I sat on the couch with the laptop detached from power. Then the issues started. When logged into the graphical environment, the machine would randomly hang and freeze after a few seconds. Not even changing to a console worked after such a freeze, I had to do a hard reset each time.
Initially I thought this was a problem with TLP, the power-saving tool for laptops, since I have had problems with TLP on this machine before. Disabling TLP did not improve the situation, however. After enabling persistent logging, I was able to hunt down the bad guy: the open-source Radeon GPU driver. It would spit out the following message again and again after a