Re: tlug: GUI Linux reliability vs other OS

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

gwalker@example.com (Gavin Walker) wrote,

gwalker> Strikes me that the most stable machines in our office are our boring,
gwalker> no GUI, Unix boxes that just sit there happily and churn. On the other
gwalker> hand, for us they aren't pleasant to use. I realize that the relative
gwalker> niceness of a Unix command line versus any GUI is debatable, but for
gwalker> doing web stuff *some* kind of GUI is pretty necessary.
gwalker> 
gwalker> Does anyone have any stats about the reliability of Linux with a GUI
gwalker> versus other OSs. I've seen loads of stuff about how reliable Linux is
gwalker> as a web/file server, but never with any kind of graphical interface.
gwalker> We're in the mood for being (moderately) radical, so it might be
gwalker> interesting to set one of our design folks up with a Linux machine.

I have a Linux box running day and night.  I use it daily
for work and of course it has a GUI -- XFree86, a free X
windows implementation -- running.  Its longest uptime was
about 4 month without a reboot and the only reason for
bringing it down was that I wanted to install a completely
different Linux distribution.  I never had a more stable
system.

Actually, the only trouble with the reliability of the GUI
that I had was while I was using a commercial X server for a
while (and these problems also were not too serious -- no
crash).

With X windows, you actually have a certain choice
concerning the window manager that you want to use.  If you
want to see some screen shots, look at WindowMaker

  http://www.windowmaker.org/features.html

which I use these days.

Cheers,

Manuel
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