Linux Stability, Is it Real?

have you only used it on your current pc?ive been using ubuntu since 7.04 and its never crashed on me, not on this PC, not on my old one, not on my laptop and not on a 1999 IBM PC. Some of the apps may crash but the basic system has always been fine.

Well, thats apart from 11.04. i hate it. im using 10.10 again lol

I have used Microsoft products that have been sold and optimized for the machine and installed it myself. I still have to tweak it to make work right. I still end up with a overpriced virus prone OS that will give me a BSOD because the registry files are so messed up from removed viruses and bad program installs and removals. I have been using Ubuntu and I do not have anti virus and have not had one virus. I have not needed to use Xkill although I have used Ctr Alt Delete on a regular basis with Microsoft. My experience has been that I can use a live disk in some random machine and it will work. I do a fresh build or I upgrade or reinstall a machine with Microsoft and if I don't have all the right drivers and specialized drivers for things like special laptop keys I am stuck. With Linux or Ubuntu someone will eventually create a fix and if I feel so inclined I could create a fix myself because I can read the source code.

I have never gotten a kernel panic using linux, but I have had the desktop environment crash from time to time. You must remember that GNU/Linux (the OS itself) is bare-bones, so to speak. A true GNU/Linux environment is a black screen -- a terminal. That's it.

That being said, some desktop environments are more stable than others. I found Gnome 2.32 to be rock solid, along with a few other, lighter desktop environments (XFCE comes immediately to mind). I've never had a crash when using these.

At the moment I'm using KDE 4.6.2 (I haven't upgraded to 4.6.3 yet, which was released a couple of weeks ago). And while 4.6.x is really coming along and is much better than the earlier 4.x releases, it does still crash now and again. But this is not the fault of Linux, as you have said.

Another thing to consider is the distro you are using and its upstream source. Ubuntu is based on Debian testing, which is reasonably stable, but is still in a testing phase, as the software is usually quite up to date. But it isn't fully tested, as the name implies, so there might be some glitches now and again.

I have a server running Debian Stable, which uses software that is frankly, out of date, but there is good reason for that. The software it does use is thoroughly tested and simply does not crash.

EDIT: Sorry, I felt that I should clarify myself in the fourth paragraph. By "glitches" I mean mostly from the applications in the repos, although sometimes that can be the desktop environment too. The kernel itself is normally tested quite thoroughly before put into the Debian testing repos upstream.

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer: Yes. I use Xubuntu 11.04

Most of the web is running on some form of Apache, a lot of which is running on a Linux box. So yeah it is stable when setup and configured properly for a single purpose.

You are a desktop user though I'm assuming, and desktop users tend to make a lot of changes to their OS and settings without really thinking much about it. Changes effect how other things in the OS work. In Linux packages have dependencies that aren't always spelled out in plain English and some of them conflict with one another, or updates to certain packages that an application depends on may not work well with some app in a third party repo. So you have to do a little searching to determine what your problem is and resolve it.

For a server, yes it is very stable.

For a desktop, it can be very stable if you do a little Googling before installing new stuff and stick to what you need.