[CentOS] General CentOS 5.1 (or Gnome) instability?

Wed Jun 4 20:14:07 UTC 2008
Alfred von Campe <alfred at von-campe.com>

I've been a big fan of CentOS for a while, and didn't have many  
issues with CentOS 4.X over the past few years.  However, since  
moving to CentOS 5.1 a few weeks ago, I have received more problem  
reports from my users than in the last year and a half on CentOS  
4.X.  I've previously reported the problem with gnome-terminal  
crashing (and since there is a single gnome-terminal process by  
default all your terminal windows disappear which makes this really  
painful), and now I'm getting multiple reports of Gnome applets  
suddenly quitting.  Sometimes this includes the entire screen  
"flashing" (probably a side effect of the "Show Desktop" applet  
exiting).  I've also had reports of some third party tools like  
SlickEdit misbehaving and/or crashing on CentOS 5.1.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not really complaining about CentOS.  I  
really appreciate what the CentOS team does.  I am just wondering if  
anyone else has seen these issues.  If it was just one or two users,  
I would suspect the hardware or some configuration issues.  But these  
issues started cropping up after I upgraded our existing systems to  
CentOS 5.1.  The "upgrade" was a complete reinstall via a kickstart  
script (I reformatted all partitions/LVs except for one), and all  
systems are configured identically.  BTW, I'm using CentOS for our  
desktops as well as our servers, and all these problems are really  
confined to the desktop systems.  Almost everyone uses the default  
Gnome desktop.

So, does anyone else have the perception that CentOS 5.X  
(particularly Gnome) is a little less stable than CentOS 4.X or is it  
just me?

Alfred