I have been bitten by this bug a lot of times in the past couple of months, so I wanted to write about it here.

gnome-shell is crashing pretty frequently for me, especially when typing an application name to launch it, or when clicking on the network/accessibility/volume icons. I hope it gets better, but that's not the point.

If it crashes a couple of times in a row -- I guess it is triggered by having more than one crash in less of ten seconds -- a screen with a "sad" computer appears, and you are told to log out.

However, I am pretty certain that keeping trying to spawn a new shell would work just fine.

Therefore, I propose adding a new button to that screen: "Keep trying". It cannot hurt. You can always show the same screen again.

Probably gsm_fail_whale_dialog_we_failed () needs to take the GsmManager * and GsmApp * parameters from inside on_required_app_failure (), keep them and associate them to the "Keep Trying" button to call gsm_app_restart () again. Sorry, I went over this really quickly.

Why is this a major bug? Because it can lead to data loss. Some unhappy moments this happened to me include:

 * when filling in a survey on the web for university students, twenty minutes of work lost;
 * during a credit card transaction on a website, not very nice;
 * during a non-resumable 4GB download from a website;
 * while calling my girlfriend when abroad, disrupting the call;
 * writing a libreoffice document; it had saved my work up to a certain point, but I lost some sparse fixes I was making to an assignment I had to deliver in an hour or so;
 * when I had a console open and I was running "grub-update" in one tab and apt-get upgrade in another. Whoops! My PC doesn't boot anymore! (fixed with a livecd after I realized what was happening)
 * many other use cases.

These things are not making me an happy user. In fact, my face quite resemble the "sad computer" you see on that screen.