But still, I did not expect a text editor to knock down my system like that.
I still do not know exactly what happened. Maybe it was a Zed issue. Maybe it was a Linux graphics issue. Maybe it was related to the editor trying to index or analyze the project. Maybe it was some unlucky combination of my system, drivers, and the application.
But from a user’s perspective, the result was simple: I clicked something in a text editor, my laptop froze, restarted, and then failed to boot normally.
That is enough for me.
Reliability beats speed
After that experience, I uninstalled Zed.
This is not a statement that Zed is a bad editor. Many developers clearly like it. Maybe on another machine, another OS, or another project, it works beautifully.
But for me, the trust was gone.
A developer tool can be experimental. It can have a different interface. It can require some learning. I am fine with that.
But it cannot make me worry about whether my operating system will boot after using it.
That is where I draw the line.
The irony is that one of the arguments against VS Code is often that it uses Chromium. And yes, Chromium is not the lightest possible foundation. It may not be the fastest choice in every benchmark.
But Chromium is battle-tested.
It is used everywhere, on many systems, by many users, every day. It may have overhead, but it is reliable. And for my day-to-day work, I choose reliability over speed every time.
A fast editor that I cannot trust is not faster in practice.
What I learned
This short experiment reminded me that developer tools are not only about speed.
For me, a good editor needs to be:
fast enough
stable
predictable
easy to navigate
comfortable with large codebases
reliable when jumping through functions and files
VS Code may not be perfect, and it may not be the most lightweight editor in the world, but it gives me a workflow I can trust.
Zed may be faster in some benchmarks, and the Rust/native approach is interesting. But in my real-world test, it did not give me enough benefit to justify the friction. And after the system freeze, the decision was easy. Final thought Trying new tools is important. I installed Zed with genuine curiosity, not with the intention to criticize it. I wanted to see whether the hype around a fast, Rust-based, non-Chromium editor would translate into a better real-world workflow for me.
It did not. But the bigger lesson for me was not only about Zed. This experience also made me question Ubuntu on my laptop. I am still a relatively new Linux user, but I have already experienced system crashes more often than I used to on Windows. That surprised me, because I expected Ubuntu to feel more stable and more secure. Maybe the issue was Zed. Maybe it was Ubuntu. Maybe it was a graphics driver, hardware compatibility, or some unlucky combination of all of them. I do not know yet. What I do know is that I do not want to judge the whole Linux experience from one installation. So I will probably create another partition, install another Linux distro, and make Zed one of the first applications I test there. Then I will see how it behaves in a different environment.