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Simon Brooke

@marcan Detail disagreement: "if X crashed it had a high chance of making your whole machine unusable".

No, that really isn't true. I was using X11 on BSD from 1988, on System V.4 from 1989, on UnixWare from (I think) 1992, and on Linux from 1993. I don't recall X crashing on the BSD or System V.4 at all. on Linux, X was pretty flaky in those days and crashed not infrequently; on UnixWare it did crash, but not often. I don't recall any X crash that locked the machine.

16 May 2023 at 15:43 | Wall-to-wall | Open on mastodon.scot
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Daniel Barlow

@simon_brooke @marcan my observation here is that β€œmaking your whole machine unusable” is true iff the machine is essentially single-user and all of the applications/programs running on it are connected to the X server. Which is probably more likely true for the average Linux user than on more traditional Unices which more often had separation between compute server and display server.

Am now trying to remember the last time I had a unix account with uid > 1000 …

16 May 2023 at 16:04 | Open on brvt.telent.net
clacke: looking for something πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡­πŸ‡°πŸ’™πŸ’›

@simon_brooke I think it's clear from context that "high chance of making your whole machine unusable" refers specifically to XOrg/XFree86 running as root with its own video drivers directly poking hardware, not any conceivable X11 implementation.

On platforms where X wouldn't crash there isn't any evidence of what would have happened if it did.

On Linux my experience doesn't agree with yours and I have frequently had to power cycle a machine or best case ssh into it and reboot it because XFree86 had locked up all human I/O interfaces.

@marcan

@simon_brooke I think it's clear from context that "high chance of making your whole machine unusable" refers specifically to XOrg/XFree86 running as root with its own video drivers directly poking hardware, not any conceivable X11 implementation.

On platforms where X wouldn't crash there isn't any evidence of what would have happened if it did.

29 May 2023 at 10:23 | Open on libranet.de
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