Linux

Are you sure? It seems like WDDM has a user-mode "User-mode display driver" - which looks to me like the HW-specific part of Mesa: it's invoked by the D3D runtime - and a "Display miniport driver", which is in the kernel.

See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-vista-and-later-display-driver-model-operation-flow

That said, no doubt Linux's ability to reset drivers is way, way behind... We're coming up on 20 years since Windows could recover from a graphics driver reset reliably without losing the desktop, and only partial hacks exist on Linux today.

I really need to get around to building a sample HTML page to show how unsafe having WebGL enabled on Linux browsers is. One long shader, and your desktop is a goner.

This is a huge advantage of Windows...

+1 to ctrl-alt-fsomething (start at f1 and go up to move through the different virtual terminals). once in a while there are graphics problems which this will fix.

If you're using GNOME Shell on X you can reload the shell (and all of its extensions) with alt-f2 and then in the "Run a command" dialog that appears type r and hit enter. Unfortunately this doesn't work in GNOME on Wayland.

I agree with Ctrl+Alt+F1/F2 but would add

init 3 init 5

but I learned for my case its better to reboot if my GPU is acting up the instability would eventually come back

Thanks Zorin OS uses GNOME with Wayland

While these can help on other issues, these will do nothing if the driver has an unrecoverable issue.

I have a case. My PC at work is a HP Celeron PC. For some reason the Intel HD drivers go nuts in Office and the whole ribbon just turns black. That spreads to all other applications and makes every signel menu bar just a black rectangle. The only solution to this is to restart the driver. No driver or windows update could fix it.

exactly my thought

That's specific to X11. It also wasn't always enabled for security reasons (breaking out of a locked screen). Now with Wayland there's no standard.

It's turned off by default in a lot of distros these days but it can be turned back on. It used to be that editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf was recommended but because file inclusions are a thing these days, it makes more sense to create a new file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/enable-killing-xserver.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option "DontZap" "false"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier                       "Keyboard Defaults"
        MatchIsKeyboard        "yes"
        Option                           "XkbOptions" "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"
EndSection

Then restart the X server (which, these days, is pretty much a reboot). Or, going through the x.org documentation archives, it looks like you could dispense with the config files and run setxkbmap -option "terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp" in a terminal session and that'll do the same thing.

Additionally, it terminated all gui processes. Which the windows shortcut mentioned in the question doesn't.

That doesn't work for Wayland and I'm unsure which one Zorin uses

That is not an equivalent.

On Linux, if a graphical app does not crash from this, that is a rare exception.
On windows, if a graphical app crashes from that, that is an exception.

That doesn't restart anything. That kills the X11 server.

It may or may not restart depending on system settings.

I was thinking of that when I read this and was like. windows has something like this???

That is just the key to kill the X server. It does not restart anything.

I think on some distros this is disabled by default. I have forgotten how you can re-enable it.

Average linux help post, someone comes along saying "why do you need that" instead of being helpful lol