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I don't think he was making a point that Linux is bad about crashing, so much as the way you're notified isn't as elegant as it maybe could be.
OSX's panic screen is clear and concise, and you know that the system has crashed. I have seen one kernel panic on Linux in the 3 years I've been using it, and I had the same experience. Screen looks frozen, and on my keyboard numlock and scroll lock were blinking. I had a pretty good idea that the kernel had panic'd when I couldn't alt+sysrq REISUB my way out of it, but it is definitely not an intuitive way of alerting the user the system has crashed. The Windows BSOD and OS/2 TRAP screens aren't beautiful, but they leave no doubt what happened.
I'm pretty sure that's the point he was making.
edit: typos
Edited 2008-08-14 04:20 UTC
Firefox 3 actually panics Linux for me, and it took a while before I realised the flashing lights were a kernel panic notification. X.org and Linux are in the process of implementing the backend stuff that will enable the kernel to push a kernel panic message onto the screen. Even while running X. Yeah, it's back to the future...




Member since:
2005-11-14
I've been running Linux for years (guess about 4 years as my primary desktop), and I've never had a kernel panic. If you're using some sort of custom kernel, you can't generalize Linux and say that Linux is very bad about such things. Seems to be more of a problem with your setup than what the overwhelming majority of people do.