I just had to reboot because clicking anything in the browser randomly started sending the CPU utilisation to higher 70s, which was triggering the fans to spin at full power.
Then I ran a game on Steam and Steam said it’s running, but it was nowhere to be found. Had to reboot again.
Both of these happened completely randomly after I changed nothing, just browsing the web.
Do you get a window? If so, you can xkill (or the Wayland equivalent, if you compositor provides one).
Failing that, yeah, it can be quite difficult to identify the right proc to kill. Sometimes showing the process “tree” and the full “command line” can help.
I run games in full screen mode, so maybe it would work. Seems like Wayland has Ctrl+Meta+Esc as the equivalent of xkill. I’ll try this if it happens again.
Stable means unchanging. Stable does not mean free of faults.
I don’t know anything about MS Windows anymore, but I tend to doubt it’s as stable as Debian Stable, since we are constantly getting accused of being “too old” because of our stability policies.
To me “stable” means: “fire and forget”. Maybe a reboot needed every couple of months because something broke, or having to kill a hung process. That’s my experience with Windows nowadays.
I’m on Garuda Linux, which is based on Arch Zen, and every now and again something random breaks. Network connection doesn’t stand up after sleep. Steam randomly breaks. Signal refuses to connect. One monitor’s brightness doesn’t go back to default value after the OS dimmed it due to inactivity. Uninstalled application still shows up in Application Launcher’s search results, even though I deleted it from the KDE Menu Editor.
My Linux desktop required about a reboot a week, but I think that’s because I was using a kernel and syatemd from Debian Unstable. When I’m getting both of those from Debian Stable, I only reboot when there’s a security fix in one of those.
I do have a couple of issues I work around on a daily basis, but they aren’t even bad enough for me to open a Debian bug, so I don’t expect them to change/get fixed.
Also, I refuse to blame Linux or Debian when I acquire and use software outside of the Debian repositories.
How about this - I configured Kate to have full Markdown support, with preview.
There was an update today. The Document Preview plugin got disabled and once I enabled it, it’s no longer able to display Markdown preview.
That’s what I call “unstable”. Shit randomly breaking for no reason at all. And I know it’s probably SOME dependency SOMEWHERE that got updated which broke a DIFFERENT dependency, but that’s kind of my point - things like this just don’t happen on Windows (since around Win10).
I didn’t get an update today. That said, I believe you, but I can’t speak to the stability guarantees of your software provider unless you name (and shame!) them.
I doubt this would be considered a release-critical bug in Debian, so it is certainly possible for breakage like this to occur between releases. If it was a security issue, then … I hope you are assuaged that your old way was a vulnerability that needed to be disabled for your safety. While distributions and developers try to avoid such breakage, sometimes it is inevitable or just the result to trying to minimize the vulnerability window, chronologically speaking.
I do think that MS Windows users got surprised when their Notepad experience changed unexpectedly recently. Maybe you don’t consider that equivalent, but it is instability.
Anyway, my experience is that Debian Stable is more stable than the MS Win 10 laptop issued by my previous employer. And, I don’t know of any rigorous studies comparing the Linux stability with MS Win stability, so I’ll tend to prefer to be guided by my experience. (And, I don’t expect you to abandon your experience in favor of my anecdotes.)
(Honestly, I’d probably still be using Free Software even if it was less stable that Proprietary Software, but I am glad Debian Stable does focus on stability and I do support most of the policies they use to implement it.)
Probably updating the client in the background, for some reason this is the default updating behavior on Linux unlike the visible progress bar on Windows
Wellllll, I wouldn’t go that far.
I just had to reboot because clicking anything in the browser randomly started sending the CPU utilisation to higher 70s, which was triggering the fans to spin at full power.
Then I ran a game on Steam and Steam said it’s running, but it was nowhere to be found. Had to reboot again.
Both of these happened completely randomly after I changed nothing, just browsing the web.
There are many different ways to define “stable”. Linux is better in some, windows might be better in others.
You dont have to restart your Computer, you can also just kill a task.
To make it simple use something like mission center
Steam does something weird when running a Windows game via Proton. I haven’t figured out which task to kill to kill a game it’s running.
Do you get a window? If so, you can xkill (or the Wayland equivalent, if you compositor provides one).
Failing that, yeah, it can be quite difficult to identify the right proc to kill. Sometimes showing the process “tree” and the full “command line” can help.
Beat of luck!
I run games in full screen mode, so maybe it would work. Seems like Wayland has
Ctrl+Meta+Escas the equivalent ofxkill. I’ll try this if it happens again.Stable means unchanging. Stable does not mean free of faults.
I don’t know anything about MS Windows anymore, but I tend to doubt it’s as stable as Debian Stable, since we are constantly getting accused of being “too old” because of our stability policies.
To me “stable” means: “fire and forget”. Maybe a reboot needed every couple of months because something broke, or having to kill a hung process. That’s my experience with Windows nowadays.
I’m on Garuda Linux, which is based on Arch Zen, and every now and again something random breaks. Network connection doesn’t stand up after sleep. Steam randomly breaks. Signal refuses to connect. One monitor’s brightness doesn’t go back to default value after the OS dimmed it due to inactivity. Uninstalled application still shows up in Application Launcher’s search results, even though I deleted it from the KDE Menu Editor.
Lots and lots of little things like that.
That’s not the definition of stable.
My Linux desktop required about a reboot a week, but I think that’s because I was using a kernel and syatemd from Debian Unstable. When I’m getting both of those from Debian Stable, I only reboot when there’s a security fix in one of those.
I do have a couple of issues I work around on a daily basis, but they aren’t even bad enough for me to open a Debian bug, so I don’t expect them to change/get fixed.
Also, I refuse to blame Linux or Debian when I acquire and use software outside of the Debian repositories.
How about this - I configured Kate to have full Markdown support, with preview.
There was an update today. The Document Preview plugin got disabled and once I enabled it, it’s no longer able to display Markdown preview.
That’s what I call “unstable”. Shit randomly breaking for no reason at all. And I know it’s probably SOME dependency SOMEWHERE that got updated which broke a DIFFERENT dependency, but that’s kind of my point - things like this just don’t happen on Windows (since around Win10).
I didn’t get an update today. That said, I believe you, but I can’t speak to the stability guarantees of your software provider unless you name (and shame!) them.
I doubt this would be considered a release-critical bug in Debian, so it is certainly possible for breakage like this to occur between releases. If it was a security issue, then … I hope you are assuaged that your old way was a vulnerability that needed to be disabled for your safety. While distributions and developers try to avoid such breakage, sometimes it is inevitable or just the result to trying to minimize the vulnerability window, chronologically speaking.
I do think that MS Windows users got surprised when their Notepad experience changed unexpectedly recently. Maybe you don’t consider that equivalent, but it is instability.
Anyway, my experience is that Debian Stable is more stable than the MS Win 10 laptop issued by my previous employer. And, I don’t know of any rigorous studies comparing the Linux stability with MS Win stability, so I’ll tend to prefer to be guided by my experience. (And, I don’t expect you to abandon your experience in favor of my anecdotes.)
(Honestly, I’d probably still be using Free Software even if it was less stable that Proprietary Software, but I am glad Debian Stable does focus on stability and I do support most of the policies they use to implement it.)
Probably updating the client in the background, for some reason this is the default updating behavior on Linux unlike the visible progress bar on Windows