Ubuntu v14.04
Simply opening the Chrome browser causes Ubuntu to freeze completely. No key strokes are effective and the mouse pointer is frozen in place or disappears. After a hard reboot, I opened other programs including Firefox in order to reassure myself that it was most likely Chrome causing the issue.
I saw posts suggesting various actions, such as clearing your history, that require getting into the Chrome menu but it freezes before I have the chance to try. I do have various extensions enabled so I tried opening Chrome from the command line with the flag –disable-plugins and that bought me a few seconds but then everything froze anyway.
Best Answer
Run Chrome from a terminal with the flag --disable-gpu
Then select:
Options - Settings - Show Advanced Settings
Under the System heading, uncheck "Use hardware acceleration when available" and restart the browser.