It has happened to every university student forced to use a linux “workstation”:
You are working on a linux box, and are close to being productive. Suddenly, the screen turns black, some lines of meaningless text appear, and seconds later you are greeted by a login screen. You have just experienced an Xorg crash, or as the zealots call it, an “X server restart”. Xorg crashes happen when an application goes bad and X can’t contain it, so it quits, taking all the other apps with it.
The aftermath of this behavior is remarkable: Windows needs a really bad driver or a serious hardware failure to crash, yet a flash player hiccup is all it takes for linux to lose your session.
For that reason, the zealots are keen to point out that X restarts don’t count as real crashes. Sure, you may have lost 3 hours of work, but the kernel technically survived, so it’s not as a real crash. And it’s your fault anyway for using those whimpy GUIs and not a console session with good old vi and pine, like god tux intended.
Comments
Funny you posted this.
While I was busy putting a lab pc to good use (to watch stuff on youtube), I decided to show a friend of mine the amount of games available in the apple store (he’s one of the 'macs have no games’ crowd). The computer COMPLETELY FROZE, I’m serious, the only thing I could do was ctrl-alt-f2 and get a command line… How usefully. ctrl-alt-backspace didn’t work, I’ll never understand why they disable it.
Oh wait… linux never crashes that’s why.
It was fedora btw, don’t know what version, they used to have fedora 7 but they updated it.
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