John Aldrich wrote:
>
> On Wed, 11 Aug 1999, you wrote:
> > New guy here again:
> >
> > It seems the Linux OS is very complex so far. What is the true advantage
> > to running this OS rather than a Windows 98 system? Believe me I hate
> > Bill Gates and will be happy when he folds - that is why I am switching
> > to Linux - but is there really an advantage at this point in the game or
> > should people wait another few years until the hard parts have been made
> > easy for the common man with GUI's and such?
> >
> My feeling about the BEST reason to switch is the following:
> When an app crashes in Windows, the whole O/S crashes along
> with it to some extent. When an app crashes in Linux, only
> in rare circumstances will it cause the O/S to crash. Even
> when Linux becomes unstable due to an app crashing, you can
> USUALLY just kill the offending app and Linux will become
> stable again, and if not, you can at least shut down
> cleanly and reboot (making sure NOT to start up the
> offending app until you know what you did wrong <G>)
> John
A nice example of this happened to me last night. I've got a glitchy
video card that I can't afford to replace just yet. It causes problems
in Windows, and even Linux occasionally. Last night it locked up KDE to
the point that keyboard input was dead. I telnetted across from my
server, 'su'd to root, and successfully rebooted the machine (I couldn't
seem to kill all of the X-Windows processes because some had '?' where
the pid# should have been).
Now, what I'm suspecting is happening with the video card is that it's
overheating (lousy air circulation in an over-packed case), and when I
try to kill X with the ctrlaltbackspace trick, it hangs because it can't
get the video card back into a known state.
The short of it is, I would have just had to hard boot the machine if
I'd been running windows at the time.
- Theo
