I've been using konsole (KDE 4.2) for a while now but it crashed recently. Konsole is efficiently designed to use one instance for all of the windows for your entire X session. Extra-unfortunately, because of this ingenuity the crash brought down all the humpty-dumptys and their bashes and their bashes' applications and all the begattens' begattens all the way down to Jebodiah Springfield into one big flat nonexistent omelette.

The fact that this app is capable of crashing under any circumstances is pretty disappointing. Although KDE 4.2 is not expected to be entirely stable -- and yes, I know, I should update my distro -- it's still a no-sell for me, since if at all possible, this sort of thing Shouldn't Happen to something that's likely to be a foundation for an entire working environment. Maybe this is arrogant and unrealistic, but if it's possible to have something more stable, I want it.

So other than running under screen -- which is fun, nifty, and thus far flawless in its reliability, but which has some issues with not understanding certain keycodes -- I'm looking for ways to improve my environment's reliability. The most obvious strategy is to cast about for a more reliable console app. A standard featureset -- which to me includes tabbed windows, Unicode support, and a decent level of keyboard shortcut configuration -- is pretty much essential. I'm currently running gnome-terminal and roxterm, both of which have acceptable featuresets (pretty much identical, actually; I think rox is actually the superset), and neither of which have provided me with extensive, objective reliability data. Not that they were expected to.

Other strategies are also welcome. Were I responding to this question I would perhaps suggest backgrounding critical tasks with & and/or disowning them so they don't come down with the global pandemic. And stuff like that.