I was exaggerating a bit. But people are still expecting a stable release number to mean the system is stable and has been in the beta unstable stage for quite a while getting beaten up by the bold and bug fixes applied. It's the kernel, the stable releases have always been solid and people trust that they always will be.

My point remains. The release cycle is about as fast as it can be and still live up to that expectation.

Here in the US we have brown outs. They aren't from storms but from power shortages when everyone runs their climate control systems (heat and a/c) during the peak times in summer and winter. Usually the power doesn't even go completely out, it just hiccups with a visible flicker in the lights.

In any case, it isn't ALL power outages. During the course of working on a system I might power it off in a half booted state a dozen times. If I'm trying to boot a dvd and miss the window I don't wait for the OS to come all the way up and properly power down I'll just hit the switch and start over. EXT3/4 and NTFS are all pretty solid and I've never lost a system because of improper shutdown on those fs. Scratch that, I have had to chkdsk and fixboot the ntfs stuff though I haven't lost one and EXT3+ hasn't needed even that. Well okay, I did lose a system once but that was only because a laptop chose to overheat during a full disk encryption process!

"Of course there's (parts of) southern France where you have one about daily, but I can't see how one can operate a computer there without a battery at all."

I have absolute confidence you could run a personal system with ext3 in those conditions and it would be fine. You could power it off multiple times every day and have no issues.

"When you really don't know what you're talking about it's best to shut up."

Agreed. Feel free at any time. Or perhaps you want to come back with some more of your anecdotal evidence.

"I've been running (many) production servers on Linux since 1995"

I can't imagine what could be a more clear indication of not knowing what you are talking about than bringing servers into a discussion of personal system usage conditions. My linux servers have 400+ day uptimes. You aren't exactly fscking them every time you turn around. Solid as a server means not going down in the first place. Solid as a personal system means recovering from the inevitable constant downs. Windows was and is a joke as a server. But the simple fat fs was more durable than ext2 hands down, it was/is slower and there is no feature comparison even with ext2 but it is definitely more stable.

"what the hell operating system did you think most of the Internet was running on in those days?"

Again. That is a discussion about servers. Off topic.

"If "power flickers" happen that often to you, maybe you should have the electrical wiring in you home examined. Or maybe, with your grid, you need an UPS?"

You genuinely don't have personal systems get improper shutdowns a couple times a month? It really isn't that often. And I definitely don't need to buy a UPS to make up for an unstable fs. FAT was hardly indestructable and it wasn't as fast as ext2 imho but it could still handle a few improper shutdowns a week for a year or two without issue. Longer than windows could go before bitrotting in any case.

"What a load of rubbish! Linux was perfectly usable and stable even before ext3 came around, and perfectly fit to be used as a mission critical server! (which many companies actually did!)"

A mission critical server is a completely different scenerio and I deployed no shortage of them during the ext2 period. A mission critical server has redundant power supplies, each plugged to a different circuit and UPS buffered and backed with at least one of those circuits backed by a diesel generator. If you had four or five improper shutdowns during the life of a server something was wrong.

"The reason why ext3 was eventually needed is because disks became big enough that fsck was starting to take unreasonably long times (in the rare event of a crash), and so something more efficient was needed."

And because fsck failed to recover the ext2 filesystem about 20% of the time.

Sure I've got UPS's. They aren't for my desktops and old laptops though.

"Ah rubbish. All PC OS's from the 90s when linux started had filesystems you wouldn't trust a business with"

Nonsense the only other PC OS worth mentioning was Windows and it had FAT32. Granted FAT didn't have any fancy features and you'd have to wait for a scandisk but you could power the system off unsafely every day for a year without doing any significant damage.

EXT2 was faster than FAT32 but forget my business. I couldn't trust my disposable personal system to it. Even I can't afford to waste time reloading an OS every few days. Especially one that required as much tinkering as 90's desktop linux.

"I'd say too conservative, if they were only updating the third digit every few months."

I beg to differ. This is the kernel not some userland app or even a daemon. Stable releases are supposed to be reliable enough to trust with billions of dollars in data flow and human life support systems on the day of release.

I could see Linux making inroads into the business desktop world if it ever got a decent exchange replacement.

Actually if I have any complaint about Linux its the fact that most of your assistance comes from google (the same with any os/complex hardware) and there is so much outdated documentation out there.

Someone whose card wasn't detected might well find information telling them how to play with those obsolete technologies. You might even still be able to install some of the stuff it tells you to. Actually with old documentation it likely tells you download some tarball onto your binary distro and ./configure, make, make install it! I know far too many people who turn perfectly good systems into nasty unworkable crap that way. The sad thing is they are usually older *nix hackers who learned things this way before repos existed and were fairly complete.

Seriously kids install binaries for your distro. Failing that, alter distro source rpms to build rpms that are as you need them. Failing that use an rpm explicitly marked as arch independent and alter it and any dependencies to match their labels on your distro (yum localinstall NOT rpm -i). Failing that, build an rpm that does so yourself. Replace all that with debs where appropriate in deb land. If you have a guide that starts by telling you to download a tarball and install it then try getting the rpm and following from there if you can't find one specific to your distro.

"Journaling makes sense for servers; not so much for personal boxes."

I'm sorry my friend but you must be insane. I don't go uncleanly powering off my boxes intentionally but it still happens a couple times over the course of a month for various reasons (power flickers and the like). In my experience ext2 will fsck its way back to functionality 4 or 5 times tops before it won't fix or the data lost in the fixing is something critical.

Linux was a fun toy and nothing more before ext3 because ext2 is the most destructible filesystem on earth. Don't get me wrong, I played with that toy but that is all it was.

That is great in a world where the senate does its job and approves any candidate who is not obviously unqualified that the Presidents appoints to a position.

Here in the real world the senate twists it's token approval authority to hijack the appointment process and deny perfectly qualified candidates. Or in this case to not only deny candidates but castrate an entire government agency.