Comment 76 for bug 1301015

'networking restart' was found to be able to to break some GUIs, as reported here:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ifupdown/+bug/1072518

Apparently '/etc/init.d/networking restart' was bringing down entire desktop environment (obviously on desktop version of OS). It was reported for Ubuntu >=12. Also I've noted that the people there where mentioning frequently also Network Manager, so I can imagine that some faulty link between some GUI component and networking was introduced, which may lead under certain conditions to a crash (pls correct me if you went further in this investigation). So, disabling of networking restart seems to be quick workaround to overcome some bigger problem in GUI. Do not ask me why to do the same for the server OS.

I can imagine that with introduction of Unity desktop (exactly starting from Ubuntu12) which is purely 'consumeristic' with all its blinking, jumping, scrolling semitransparent stuff, they did not manage to keep anymore well separated GUI from key system functionalities...

I'm personally using Ubuntu 12 Server with Gnome 3 traditional GUI (w/o Network Manager) on my laptop for several years already, and '/etc/init.d/networking restart' did never brake my system. I'm running Ubuntu 12 server at several servers, and did never get trouble with networking restart. I've recently installed Ubuntu 14 server + classical Gnome 3 on one desktop, and after adjusting /etc/init.d/networking as suggested by Joshua (#33), and restarted it several times after - nothing bad did happen to the desktop GUI...

It seems to be rather sad trend in OS developing when faults in GUI determines future of server OS. I want to believe that in the next future we will not need to reboot after every change in configs of Cups, Samba, Apache... Like one should do in Windows.