About that Total Crash Kaput State !

[Gtrax]

We have all been there. You know the scene - mouse pointer is stuck there, keyboard so gone that not even the 3-fingered salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) is going to do anything for you.

Its very rare that it happens at all now when using Linux distros. Sometimes applications will hang, but not usually the OS. This time, its certain videos on Youtube, when running Firefox. Duh - maybe some combination of adblocker and fancy tabs - who knows. A power-off reboot is not going to help my mood, but life is too short to become overly knotted about it.

So it occurs to me, you folk probably know all sorts of scenarios that risk a total freeze - do tell

[Freston]

Youtube is a common offender. Also, the Active Streaming Format used by a site I frequent has some trouble with my mplayer plugin (although it could be the other way around). It's rather unstable, specially when I put the media stream on pause.

I have found though that crashing media in Firefox resolves itself after some time. You get prompted to kill Firefox. The only thing that forces me to actually reboot is AssaultCube, but only occasionally. Usually I can solve it by ctrl+alt+F1 to a terminal and kill it.

What else? On occasion some application crashes. But usually it just goes *poof* gone and I see the bare desktop. Click on icon, and the application is back up.

[Gtrax]

I do notice that "freezes" are often associated with some important, but not usually visible application getting into a state while waiting for a response from something else - like a network, or a media read.

Don't get me wrong, the Linux experience in this respect is way better than with Windows.