I fail to see a connexion between a file-system error and a total
O.S. meltdown. Perhaps a better analogy would be "kernel panic".
I've read about such a thing but in ten years of Unixing I've never
seen one (nor have I seen "freeing free inode" for that matter).
The worst bug I have actually encountered is XFree86 biting the dust
every two or three months (then again I'm running an old version).
But even that is just a minor annoyance, which dumps you back in a
text shell and requires restarting X. The last time it happened was
entirely my fault: I became super-user and uninstalled an X desktop
environment (by "rpm -e") while X was running. Doh!
So I put back in a link X -> XF86_SVGA and "startx"ed. Back up in
seconds. Did I lose any work? Of course not. Restarted Netscape and
it went back to the URL I just been at. Restarted my new-reader. "Do
you want to auto-recover?" Sure. Brought up emacs, everything had
been saved so no need to auto-recover. Started up a shell. You know
what sucks? Shells don't return to the previous working directory so
one actually has to "cd" into it.
Altogether I wasted an entire minute or two of my life, which put me
in an almost apoplectic rage. I'm a busy man who doesn't have minutes
of his life to be lost for no good reason and can't stand being
snapped out of deep-hack-mode.
Imagine if I tried to work on some piece of crap that you and your
masters are pushing... I'd be dead in a week.
Have a day,
Rob.