@PNSmith actually this is less a newbie question than you might think. When a kernel dies without any warning, this often means that your hardware is not supported or misconfigured. This happened for me when I was working in a virtual machine what I have discussed with the developers on github. In this forum I discussed a similar issue when somebody was working with an Apple user who’s hardware allegedly was not supported anymore.
Therefore, please tell more about your hardware. What type of CPU do you use? Are you on a virtual machine? Anything else noteworthy?