Introduction
The key part missing from the title is the number of times you have to click your mouse in order to bring Linux Mint to its knees.
How can you crash Linux Mint 17.3? Read on to find out.
The Video
Obviously the fact that I am linking to a video as this week's blog post means that I am not really at the point of releasing a new feature article such as a review or tutorial.
I have been looking at the Raspberry PI 7 Inch Touchscreen which I received as a birthday present and I have to admit that this has taken up more of my time than I should really admit to.
I have also installed Linux Mint 17.3 and I have been testing it out over the past week in order to write a review. This article however is nothing to do with anything I have found in Linux Mint.
When I am not installing Linux and writing articles about it I like to scour the news pages, read and answer Quora questions and watch Linux videos on Youtube.
Recently I have been watching the Linux Help Guy videos but he has decided not to focus so much time on Linux which has left a bit of a void. I therefore had a look at the videos uploaded in the past week by other people to see what was being discussed.
When you see the title "How to crash Linux Mint Just By Clicking Your Mouse" you instantly want to know what the user did.
The video is linked above so you can click on it and watch it if you so desire. I found myself enjoying it just because it was so bizarre but really the whole thing is a bit n'ye.
So How Do You Crash Linux Mint By Clicking Your Mouse
First of all you can't kill Linux Mint simply by clicking your mouse once. In fact in the video the user didn't really get Linux Mint to crash, he simply managed to get it using so many resources it slowed down to a virtual standstill and it took him some time to get to that point.
The process is as follows:
- Click on the floppy drive symbol
- An error message appears telling you that there is no floppy disk in the drive.
- Go to step 1 and repeat the steps again and again and again without closing the error messages
My first thought when I saw this was "1991 called, they want their computer back".
My second thought was that the computer hasn't actually crashed. The guy who made the video admits that it still responds although the response is a large amount of time.
Technically this may be a fault within Linux Mint but you would have to question the sanity of somebody who ignores an error message hundreds of times whilst leaving the error displayed on the screen.
An update at the bottom of the Youtube page says that the issue can occur with any error message and not just because you clicked the floppy drive without a disk being inserted.
Where of course this could result in an issue is if you wrote a program or script which inadvertantly included an endless loop displaying error messages over and over. I guess in this scenario your machine might grind to a halt before you had a chance to kill the rogue program.
My Verdict
To be honest, in the week that Star Wars was released, the best I can say is "move on, this isn't the article you are looking for".
For me it is the equivalent of continually opening tabs within Chrome on an old netbook. Sooner or later Chrome throws a memory error, although it is handled in a much better way than grinding to a halt.
It would be interesting to see how many times you would have to get the error to display on a modern machine before it becomes unusable.
This isn't the only video by vwestlife and I have found myself watching more and more of them.
For instance this one tries to work out whether dual booting Linux and Windows really does provide performance issues and this one tries to assertain whether Windows is faster than Linux. (That is of course Windows XP vs Lubuntu).
This isn't overly scientific stuff but I find it mildly amusing.
Have a great Christmas everyone. A new review will be out next week and hopefully something new about the Raspberry PI.
