Definitely not normal. Maybe the hard drives or the connections to them are broken slightly.
Bazzite
Unofficial community for Universal Blue’s Bazzite image.
Documentation: https://docs.bazzite.gg/
Official forum: https://universal-blue.discourse.group/c/bazzite/
Universal Blue on Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@UniversalBlue
Source code: https://github.com/ublue-os/bazzite/
I was managing two external hard drives
What do you mean "managing"?
I don't know if it gets overloaded with many desktop apps like QBittorrent and Brave Browser.
That's entirely dependent on your hardware. I can run a dozen different apps concurrently no problem, but I also have 64GB RAM.
By managing I mean moving files from one hard drive to another while connected to a Steam Deck dock.
Maybe 16gb is not enough?
Can you log in remotely via ssh or something? Could watch the journal in case there's errors and see if the entire machine hangs or just the screen or display controller.
It's not normal and you can't really "overload" Linux. Things get killed or just thrash and get slow but one way or another the system goes on. What does happen very often with PCs it's that the display hangs or there's a hardware or driver bug or fault. Or you have a mounted filesystem that stops responding and all programs with system calls waiting will be blocked in kernel space. Especially with network filesystems and usb bridges. They're hard to figure out.
And Brave is a series scam company.
Interesting, I will take a look for those logs