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> Linux desktops are not terribly stable and something always crashes sooner or later One's experience on the Linux desktop depends on the distro choice, the a

> Linux desktops are not terribly stable and something always crashes sooner or later One's experience on the Linux desktop depends on the distro choice, the applications used, and the hardware itself. I once had a Slackware box that ran non-stop as my daily driver with no crashes or odd behavior; I only rebooted it for kernel upgrades. I've had Debian and Ubuntu boxes that were crash-happy turds, but I've also had stable Debian-based machines. In my experience, the most stable machines are name-brand pro workstations that use fully open source GPU and audio drivers, running stable branches of conservative distros like Slackware. If you're running a bleeding edge distro like Arch on a self-built Kaby Lake or Ryzen beast with the latest and greatest GPU using closed source drivers, yeah you're going to have stability issues.

dom0 9y ago
On all distros and computers I always had the occasional PDF or image that crashed the document or image viewer. OpenOffice or LibreOffice also crashes from time to time, especially if it's used for long, or has to handle big documents, and especially if those documents were imported. I've seen all sorts of stupid interactions between media software, e.g. pausing a video in Firefox while running mplayer in the background somehow corrupted buffers on one machine. More than once I saw Flash, when it still was a thing, show garbled frame-buffer contents etc. I think your general observation is correct, though. Most spurious crashes are likely incorrect combinations of software by the distro that are only very slightly incompatible. This is way more likely on a distro that in principle just ships "the latest of everything". Many are in software that handles complex formats or interacts with the graphics / audio system. Many/all of the former have a very poor security track record which matches up with the crashes: a parser full of vulnerabilities is more likely to choke on the occasional flipped bit or on a slightly incorrect file.

dom0 9y ago

On all distros and computers I always had the occasional PDF or image that crashed the document or image viewer. OpenOffice or LibreOffice also crashes from time to time, especially if it's used for long, or has to handle big documents, and especially if those documents were imported. I've seen all sorts of stupid interactions between media software, e.g. pausing a video in Firefox while running mplayer in the background somehow corrupted buffers on one machine. More than once I saw Flash, when it still was a thing, show garbled frame-buffer contents etc. I think your general observation is correct, though. Most spurious crashes are likely incorrect combinations of software by the distro that are only very slightly incompatible. This is way more likely on a distro that in principle just ships "the latest of everything". Many are in software that handles complex formats or interacts with the graphics / audio system. Many/all of the former have a very poor security track record which matches up with the crashes: a parser full of vulnerabilities is more likely to choke on the occasional flipped bit or on a slightly incorrect file.