A long and detailed preview of Windows 7 appeared on ActiveWin. Many screenshots included. "It's safe to say I am overwhelmed, overjoyed and most of all excited about Windows 7", the author concludes.
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Member since:2005-07-22
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-20
He spent a whole paragraph explaining that yes, if you only use the well-tested and reliable (read that as *old*) parts of Linux that it is very stable.
So of course you skip all that and ask if its the fault of the X server.
Windows Vista can now recover from a video card driver failure more reliably than Linux or BSD can.
Put Linux in a 3D desktop with ATI or Nvidia binary drivers and you'll soon be needing the reset switch. Often I can log in via SSH but do NOT try a X server restart or it'll be a complete system freeze.
On my Vista gaming system it'll have a video system reset about twice a month or sometimes a screen corruption I have to log out and back in to fix, but I haven't had a system freeze or blue screen since I quit trying to use ReadyBoost.
Another problem seems to happen to me in Linux but not Windows: Last night on my Linux laptop, Evolution decided that it needed 3 GB of virtual RAM to filter email. If I'd actually needed to use the machine I'd have had to reset it. As it was I left it alone and saw in the logs that at about 4 AM it had finally decided to OOM evolution.
When a Windows program does that, generally ctrl-alt-delete and Task Manager can kill the offender in a reasonable time frame. Linux could maybe do that if anyone cared enough to fix the X server to mem-lock itself and to run a mem-locked, high priority GUI task manager.
Honestly, the Apple and Windows user experience has been getting steadily better while the Linux experience has been declining.
Member since:
2005-07-06
Windows doesn't have to be more robust than Linux, it just has to be robust enough not not crash under normal use. My Ubuntu machine is no more or less stable than my Windows XP machine. There are things I can do to reliably hang my Ubuntu desktop every time. Sure those things are technically the 'fault' of things like graphics drivers or compiz or Xorg or whatever, rather than Linux as in the kernel, but from an end user perspective it really doesn't matter. I can't remember the last time XP hung on me under normal use, while with Linux it was yesterday. The whole Linux is a more stable desktop OS than Windows is largely a myth at this point.
Linux with a robust minimal WM, running only robust well tested apps and drivers with no 'exotic' features enabled I'll agree is very stable. Linux running with all the latest bells and whistles that your typical Ubuntu insall provides cannot really make that claim. Exactly the same is basically true for Windows as well.