Further more, I suspect I now know what the culprit component =
is. It's very
likely that the problem lies within Mesa itself, and was introduced in the
switch between 13.0 and 17.0.

This was confirmed by the bug report I linked previously, which I strongly
believe is related to the issue I'm experiencing here: Another person there=
 was
able to verify that their crash happens with Mesa 17 but not 13. Looking at=
 the
dates, I realize that I started experiencing this problem precisely when
openSUSE Tumbleweed upgraded from Mesa 13.0 to 17.0: Mesa 17 landed in early
March 2017, it was a few days later that the issues began, which I then
reported the following week (08 March 2017). See my comment in the other bug
for more info on this:

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_=
bug.cgi?id=3D101325#c22

I also seem to confirm that the issue only affects RadeonSI cards but not R=
600:
My laptop has a Mobility Radeon HD 5470 card (R600) whereas my desktop has a
Radeon R7 370 card (RadeonSI). I've been away for two weeks and have been u=
sing
my laptop exclusively during this time, which has the exact same OS and
configuration as my desktop. I was able to preform every task I do on my
desktop from my laptop, including the triggers I described above... I have
never experienced this freeze with the laptop.