Some details to add to this. It only happens when I am using Eevee. It doesn't happen when the render engine is set to Cycles.

from fresh open Blender linux RC2 work fine
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, AMD FX8350 16G ram, GTX690 Nvidia 340.34

factory setting solve this issue?

can you upload a simple .blend file to reproduce this issue?

I tried resetting to factory defaults and that didn't change the issue. As far as uploading a blend file, all i could do is open blender and then save the default file. Do you want me to do that?

More info. On the host that has the issue, I'm using the nouveau display driver and 3 monitors.

I tried this test on another Linux system running Ubuntu 18.10 and it didn't have the freezup issue using the same steps above. That other system is using a GeForce GTX 1050 and the nvidia drivers. So I suppose it could be an issue with either Nouveau, 3 monitors or the GT 610 and/or nouveau drivers.

More testing. I found some old nightly builds of the 2.80 series from January and April and found some interesting results.

In the January 11th, 2019 build (blender-2.80-6439ed844e78-linux-glibc224-x86_64), I encounter the same issue that I do with RC2 using the steps above.

In the April 28th, 2019 build (blender-2.80-d2f1705b15be-linux-glibc224-x86_64), I DO NOT encounter the same issue. I'm able to modify some material settings and then go do other stuff at least for a little while. It eventually does freeze up, but it's not freezing consistently.

I tried running an strace on the RC2 blender process to see if that provided any clues as to the issue. It was showing all the syscalls running along until the freeze happened and then it just stopped until I killed the blender process. The strace unfortunately isn't very helpful. These are the last few calls I'm seeing before the process is killed.

recvmsg(3, {msg_namelen=0}, 0)          = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN|POLLOUT}], 1, -1) = 1 ([{fd=3, revents=POLLOUT}])
writev(3, [{iov_base="\22\0\10\0\2\0\340\2D\1\0\0005\1\0\0\10\0\4\0\7\0\0\0Blender\0"..., iov_len=64}, {iov_base=NULL, iov_len=0}, {iov_base="", iov_len=0}], 3) = 64
recvmsg(3, {msg_namelen=0}, 0)          = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
recvmsg(3, {msg_namelen=0}, 0)          = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
recvmsg(3, {msg_namelen=0}, 0)          = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
futex(0x7ff05f965184, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 2147483647) = 5
futex(0x7ff05f965130, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 1
futex(0x7ff05f965180, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 2147483647) = 2
futex(0x7ff05f965130, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 1
futex(0x7ff05fa08f70, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 0, NULL) = ?
+++ killed by SIGKILL +++
Killed

Just to make sure my video cards are handling 3D ok, I've been running Minecraft, Nexiuz, Neverputt, and of course Blender 2.79 works ok.

Blender not support nouveau drivers only propritary Nvidia drivers
Please install last Nvidia GPU drivers from nvidia website
Can you update you report with SystemInfo file made with Edit > Save System Info item

thank you

Interesting, this is the first I've heard of the requirement to use nvidia drivers in Linux? Is that a new requirement for 2.80 and is it indicated somewhere?

I've uploaded my system info. Although on my system it was located in Help -> Save System Info

please upgrade your system with Nvidia proprietary drivers and confirm the problem

sorry, my mistake, it is Help menu item

Well thanks for your work on Blender, I appreciate it. Maybe you think just using the Nvidia driver under Linux is an easy choice to make, but by telling me to upgrade to Nvidia drivers you are basically telling me that I need to choose between using open source drivers under Linux and being able to use Blender in the future. From my point of view this isn't a very friendly open source stance for the Blender developers to be taking.

CUDA core are activable only with proprietary drivers, is not same with AMD GPU

I am not payed from Blender and/or i have any connection with them. I try to help here as volontary, all i write is IMO until was confirmed to an Blender's payed developer

IMO you lost an opportunity to use any kind of 3D software, but this is youe choice

PEACE

I use 3D software all the time, as I mentioned other 3D accelerated software works fine without issue, not sure what makes Blender 2.80 a different case.

IMHO this report still invalid

Peace

Just to confirm you are correct, I changed my driver to nvidia-390 and now Blender works for me without issue. I broke my 3 screen desktop though as under the nouveau driver, I can use all 3 screens as one continuous desktop. Under the nvidia driver it splits it into 2 diferent desktops.

IMO It is not so
Before proprietary drivers installation, you had use a software OpenCL emulation from your CPU, you never had used GPU hardware acceleration when it was needed.
Blender Eevee needed hardware GPU acceleration to work (realtime is too expensive to CPU) or you can have many issues (as you've seen)
Cycles is designed to work with CPU or to be accelerated by CUDA (nvidia GPU) or OpenCL (AMD, Intel GPU) hardware, Eevee not

to properly configure yours GPUs with Nvidia drivers, you can use /usb/bin/nvidia-setting as root, this help a lot to configure multimonitor as split or mirror or what you want

FOSS is nice but sometimes the Others don't release their software as an open source license compatible with it, if you want to use it better you don't have many choices, you have to use a software outside of FOSS

I've been using GNU-Linux for the past 25 years and i tryed to use it where i had work, so I understand you

PEACE