Mailing the story:

Linux has come a long way in its short life, and it's more reliable and stable than ever. But things still go wrong, and you can diagnose and fix just about anything. Compositing window managers are a huge step forward in making graphical environments more stable. But sometimes your nice Linux graphical desktop still locks up, and then what do you do? Drop to a console is what you do, by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F2 on your keyboard. This takes you to a console that is independent of your graphical environment