It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.
Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it's a conf file for Xorg... but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn't, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn't true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can't handle and you're out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.
You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.
My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me...
I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.
As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure...
your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn't working or ssh'ing into my machine when the video output doesn't work
Luckily fixing fstab is pretty easy. I've broken it twice I think since I started using Linux full time about two years ago, and it's not really an issue. It takes a few minutes, but if you're remotely comfortable with the command line it's pretty trivial to get it booting again.
Had my server set up with encrypted drives and getting the root key from a flash drive. Cloned a drive and replaced the old one, somehow it was crypttab that just stopped working with me. Took like 4 hours solid to get it actually back up.
It's been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved..
Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
I'm used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there's nothing you can do about it.
It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn't move, the clock wasn't updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it's also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn't addressing them.
Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
I was dual booting, distro hopping to figure out what I liked & didn't like. After a few installs, I got cocky and thought I had the hang of things, and instead somehow deleted the bootloader, or something like that. Couldn't boot up at all to any OS.
I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it's not too hard to restore but still.
My NAS is one place where I wouldn't risk anything that isn't rock solid. Even if you don't lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.
And the fix is understandable. The number of times I've had to fuck with Windows and never quite understood what I did that made it work, because you couldn't repeat it twice. Sometimes it was just the number of reboots you needed to do for it to uncross the turd caught sideways and suddenly work fine, until it didn't...
I can't tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn't exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn't. I definitely wasn't packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.
Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would've been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.
I could've asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would've been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.
And so it's not that I think it's weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It's that I think it's weird to not understand that not everyone else did.
If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something.... anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.
It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn't you, thats cool.
To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.
But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90's and still pretty expensive in the 2000's. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.
That's why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.
I think you might be forgetting just how much e-waste was going on leading up to 2010. All the way back in 2003 I was using recycled computers for my Linux servers. Windows XP came out in 2001 and by about 2005 the number of Win98 machines being dumped was pretty high.
So I looked it up using the way back machine. I saw a flyer for my local computer store. You could buy a basic but complete computer NEW for under $200 in 2010. You also could spend thousands of course but you didn't have to. You could get a netbook new for $150.
So I went to some liquidation and used computer sites and old newspapers in 2010. A dell optiplex p4 at 2.4 ghz complete with 90 days warranty: $60. And it seems used is about $50 to $100 in general. Laptops a slight premium. And those are the ones people tried to get money back from. Lots of them were just FREE. The number of garage sale listings in the newspapers offering free computers is crazy.
And I mention all of that because Linux was how you took an old win 98 machine and turned it into a functioning web host, or email server, or NAS, or whatever back in those days.
And by the way, I think I paid $25 for my sharp zaurus used in 2005. It was so cool to have an internet handheld with color that you could use in full sunlight and ran linux.
Edit: I hope you see this! If you lived in Fayette county (GA) in 2010, you could get a Dell Optiplex GX280 P4 at 2.8 ghz complete computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard for $65, with free shipping. That should tell you something right there.
I have multiple lying around, because I'm also very forgetful. And also not only for emergencies, but mainly for maintenance, eg. editing/moving partitions.
It's definitely something you should have lying around for exactly this kind of contingency. That goes for Windows too, btw. Windows installations also get borked and having a Linux live system available can be a life saver.
I've managed MSP services and this is hog wash. In 6 years of providing Linux, Windows, and OSX I can't recall a single instance of windows bricking itself without kernel level software running in the background. And those instances are partition errors done outside of windows land.
You have to be trying to brick Windows these days to get to an unbootable state.
I on the other hand have multiple team members running random distos fuck up video drivers to the point where we had to wipe everything clean. And Linux computers were given out at a rate of like 1 for every 20 mac or osx machine.
So sure you could carry this around at all times but it's not going to be helpful for 99% of users in reality.
So there haven't been any problems with Windows updates recently? I'm happy things are running well in your particular shop. But that's not the regular experience of every business let alone home user.
So what, we're just making shit up now? Windows computers bricking themselves in secret? Business across the planet dealing with Windows breaking on updates? What subset of home users are you claiming have issues with windows looking itself on update?
There have definitively been multiple times windows systems bricked themselves on me without it being my fault
It's not rarer than Linux systems bricking in my experience. In addition, Linux systems tend to be a lot more fixable, but with windows being just a black box sometimes you're just shit out of luck and have to reinstall
Depends on how you break it. Broken partitions? Sure, Gparted it is. Everything else? Most often can be fixed with a quick arch-chroot and then undoing whatever caused the mess.
So yeah, I agree with the Ventoy suggestion. Such a neat little tool that it's earned it's place on my key-chain.
It really depends. I like using live boot arch since it just gets me into a shell that I can chroot with really fast and I don’t have to worry about any graphical elements coming into play. Of course if it is something like a laptop then that is a totally different story.
Generally though I keep luks encrypted usb drive with a full install with most everything you would need for those situations complete with a fully set up and remote managed environment over tailscale so I can keep my preferences up to date and even remote in from another device of my choice. It makes the whole recovery process suck a whoooole lot less.
Same. Though I moved to a 30€ 256GB USB-A + USB-C stick, which is more than enough for my ISOs and very quick to write on. And I hope it withstands a lot of write cycles too.
Id do the same thing! I JB welded a USB stick on my conceal carry so when I screw up my boot loader I can sigh and whip out my gun and put it in my computer.
Unrelated, I'm banned from public libraries statewide.
I'll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren't actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn't know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
Back when all I had was one computer with Linux and I got in trouble I had a bootable USB stick so I could load up a browser and search forums for a solution.
Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn't have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.
You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.
Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody's installing MacOS anyway.
I reckon it's because you can't resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don't mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo
this is such a fire line.
I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC... then someone replied "wait wouldn't just running the 'install VLC' command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?"
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
That's partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I've had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don't even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it's called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn't booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don't get me started on the keyrings when you don't update for a while.
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won't work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn't run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn't run on many laptops -- I don't know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn't work, and it couldn't sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can't remember). It did work though!
Put a distro on a flash drive. Throw the flash drive in a drawer. If computer break, retrieve flash drive. There’s your spare computer. Now try doing that with windows.
No. You have a barely functioning windows environment when using hirens that’s only useful for very specific things. Linux can boot off a flash drive and do literally anything a full install can do.
I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.
You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn't ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
openSUSE Tumbleweed (and any other distros that take advantage of BTRFS and snapshots) is what made me love Linux.
I've always used Windows, but wanted to move to Linux as it is more in line with what I feel about computers, and openSUSE made that a reality for me. Fuck something up by doing what you thought was going to be a normal operational moment? No biggie! For example, sudo snapper rollback 333, and I'm back up and running after reboot. Has literally saved me and the distro a few times now.
Needless to say, I love Windows (for what it is, hate M$ though) but I am a full Linux convert now. When I log into Linux, it feels like home. When I log into Windows, it feels like someone else's home. :P
Fellow Tumbleweed lover here for all the same reasons!
This distro has been fantastic. A few times there's been some growing pains (8/10 of those directly being Nvidia's fault by my estimation), but Snapper rollbacks have been ultra reliable in getting to "known working state" until stuff gets sorted out.
It's such an unbelievably sane and sturdy rolling release. I also appreciate YAST and how it feels like they put effort into making pro-security choices by default without interfering with the user's experience too much.
I'm stuck (probably not, though) on an old tumbleweed version because something in my networking setup gets borked when I upgrade on a headless server I have running (I know, tumbleweed isn't for servers, this is why). I just reverted to the snapshot it made before upgrading and bam, like nothing happened.
I should get that worked out, but it works fine, so...
I don't think it's specifically for servers, it's just their immutable distro. I tried it out a smidge on my cheap laptop, it was interesting. My laptop only has 32gb, so anything immutable really wasn't a good fit for it. I wasn't really a big fan of everything I add to it being flatpaks, either.
I think I have enough experience with Linux at this point that an immutable distro is more of an inconvenience to me. I don't think it would have saved me from my predicament any more than using a non-rolling distro, since this is an OS update, not anything to do with anything I did. Really my biggest setback is that this server is working just fine, so my laziness is letting me not spend a few hours to redo it right and I'm pretty sure I could just run yast and reconfigure the networking and be fine. It really was just going to be a practice/dev server so I could see if I could set things up in an environment that didn't have many handholding tutorials, the leap server it was dev for ended up moving to Debian because it started running things that I actually wanted to be sure were stable. In my infinite wisdom, this one took over the leap server's job without changing the OS.
Really, I could have just swapped drives since I was rebuilding in Debian anyway, but Homie don't play like dat.
Haha! Thank you for the explanation! I never looked into MicroOS, because I heard of Tumbleweed and wanted to give it a go since I tried one distro (it has been so long I can't even remember right now) and didn't like it too much.
Yeah, when things are working, and it might take a day or so to setup something else completely, I definitely understand your hesitation! :)
Yes! I've used quite a few of the most recommended for newbies distros, and none compare (in my experience, at least) to Tumbleweed, and that's not even a "noob friendly" distro apparently!
Like you, I had issues when installing my new graphics card. Took a few days of rolling back before I found out the correct way to install their new "open-driver" variant. Been smooth sailing since, but I also haven't zypper dup since then out of fear of it all going away again. :P
Lads and lassies and everything between, it is best to make a full snapshot of your working distro BEFORE doing anything crazy like installing new drivers. TRUST ME!
That's what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can't switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It's rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I'm sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.
TTY is short for Teletypewriter. Basically it is the terminal that you see if you don't boot into a graphical environment. You can access the TTY from anywhere by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-7 (will throw you into tty 1,2,...7, depending on which F key you pressed)
You can switch between TTYs either by pressing CTRL+ALT+,F? again, where the F-key determins on which TTY you will land, or by using CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to go back and forth one at a time.
The TTY is a terminal so you can do stuff like run commands here. If your graphical environment is broken, you will probably end up here and can often fix the problem.
Yesterday, I tried booting into Wayland on Linux Mint, and I got NOTHING.
I rebooted and got nothing again. I tried the Ctrl+alt+F(x) key combo, but that didn't work either. From your explanation, it sounds like I should've been able to at least get a terminal for that, but it didn't seem to work. Could that be because graphically, it WAS displaying something after all?
Ended up unplugging the screens from the GPU and tried plugging it straight into the mobo instead, and it ended up working after all.
Hmm...
What does nothing mean exactly?
Did your monitor turn on during boot? If so, did it turn off again at some point or did it display a completely black image?
Since the mobo connection worked (which usually uses the integrated GPU chip on your CPU as far as I know), maybe it was an issue with your gpu? Or the connector or something?
I once had a broken setup where got stuck on a black screen, unable to switch to a tty.
If I started spamming CTRL+ALT+Fsomething right after Grub was done, I managed to escape the black screen before it appeared, maybe you could try spamming the key combo early on and see if that opens a tty for you. If that is the case then you can be pretty certain that the problem is related to your desktop environment.
Alright, I've managed to open the TTY when trying to boot into Mint(wayland). You were right! It's probably an issue with my nvidia drivers. I'll see what I can do. Thanks
Nice! Since your installation is showing similar symptoms to my installation when I updated my nvidia drivers a while ago, I'm just gonna tell you how I fixed my issue on my computer, and maybe it's gonna work for you too. If you want, you can try this:
Boot your PC. After your Motherboard is done showing its logo or whatever it shows, you should see grub. If you press 'e' before grub proceeds to boot into linux, you will be thrown into a simple editor that will let you temporarily change what grub boots.
There is a line with the kernel image and arguments, it probably starts with 'linux'. Go to the end of the line (line might span multiple rows, so end of line might be on the next row) and add this:
nvidia_drm.fbdev=0
Then press F10 to boot. That's it.
This fixed the issue for me. If it will fix the issue for you as well, you can consider adding it to your kernel parameters permanently or making sure the nvidia kernel module gets the parameter by other means.
**I appreciate the help immensely. ** First thing I needed to do was figure out how to get grub to show, and to do that, I changed a file in /etc/default/grub to have the menu style be "menu" instead of "hidden".
Second I tried adding the nvidia_drm.fbdev=0, but it would boot directly into the default version of Mint (x11). I then had to disable auto-login in the lightdm.conf found in /etc/lightdm/
After that, I finally booted into Wayland again after adding the temporary parameters and... I get a black screen again, sadly. At least the TTY works so I can get out, no problem.
I did a bunch more tinkering that I found online, but after a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing, I went back to x11, only to realize that the driver manager was well and truly messed up. Could not get it to start at all. Ended up feeling pretty happy I took a snapshot of the system before I started all this, cause I could just rollback everything and now it works like before. (Still no wayland though, but whatever :P )
Interesting. I'll see if I can figure something out.
Answering your question, it booted to a black screen. The screen was "on", it wasn't complaining about not recognising a signal or anything, so SOMETHING must've transmitted. I'll try spamming some keys to see if I get a reaction. Thanks for the tip
Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It's been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.
I am a teacher by trade, so I absolutely love helping others. I'll absolutely pass it forward! This is also how you build a healthy community, I think :D
Tbf this would be the same on windows (well, if there was a fix other than reinstall...), unless you just already know the fix, which then would be the same on linux, you just don't know it yet.
Besides, since windows only fix would be to reinstall, no second pc needed, just keep the installation drive and treat it like a windows reinstall, bam same same.
Yeah, im kinda young and grew up with a smartphone in my pocket so this seems like a non issue to me. I guess some people who aren't as old still think landlines are the hot new thing?
To a slightly lesser extent, that's also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn't, it's downright impossible.
At least Linux usually has some useful error messages. On Windows, you get a fucking "Error Code 0x0000000f" and looking it up usually leads to some confidently incompetent layperson telling the OP to make sure their drivers are updated, or someone who managed to trick Microsoft into giving them a title of "assistant" on the official forum suggesting Windows Diagnostics like that's ever done anything useful, and at that point I just wanted to fucking die.
I'll take a fucked-up xorg.conf over that clown show.
I had a BSoD on Windows that googling said "could be hardware or software related". Thanks, I guess. Nothing in the logs even suggested anything happened except the several hours gap between other useless logs.
Have you had severe fuckups yearly with Windows, or Linux?
I've had bi-yearly severe fuckups with Windows and have yearly (probably more) severe fuckups with Arch;
the fix to the latter is a thumb drive away, the fix to the former is an ancient ritual which the FBI is still investigating me for.
I've been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like "tore critical system components I don't need out from the install media" level of customized. A good chunk of the "modify windows for privacy" tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren't there on my install.
No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.
The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.
I agree that its common across all distros. I disagree on self inflicted. Its as if you didnt bother to teach tour kid to ride a bike and laugh at them for falling.
We're a massively diseducated population by now. Friends of mine complain when they have to use a file system instead of buttons to open files and are shocked that making an app instead is expensive.
Unfortunately most people are utter slaves of convenience, they'd gladly suffer 30 seconds of unskippable ads every time they open the start menu rather than re-learn how a different operating system works - doing the latter has a (potentially) massive ROI, but it is quite a big step, and that's what gets them
Just to be clear: while I've seen ads in one form or another in every (non-LTSC) installation of Windows 10 and 11 I've ever made, I'm not claiming that Windows 11 actually shows unskippable ads (in video format) when using the start menu yet, that was a hyperbole.
Tons of airports and train systems run either Windows 3.0 or Windows XP if they are recent.
They don't want to update because they have already encountered every problem that could arise ever. Which they know how to fix in mere minutes.
And upgrading anything would mean the entire business can't function during it. Afterwards you also have tons of new problems that could take days to fix since they don't have the knowledge yet. Which could endanger lives.
Because for the majority of people the experience is reversed
I’ve never had WiFi drivers just broke in my windows laptop out of the blue. With Linux that happened more than once. And having your wifi drivers break when you are not at home is super annoying to deal with because you can’t get to the usual fix.
Try installing nvidia drivers on Linux and then report back in a few days
Windows is shit but it’s more convenient and reliable and works way more easily out of the box for 99% of people. This is not even debatable
And for the record I use all 3 major OSs. They all have their uses and Linux is great for a lot of shit but you 100% have to thinker with it way more than with other OSs.
WiFi performance is iffy, same with Bluetooth. We have a ton of data from the company I work it so it’s not even just 1 machine. It’s a few dozen.
The majority of people never install Windows at all, and even fewer install it using a generic Windows installer rather than the recovery image that came with their computer (with the drivers preinstalled).
If they did, they would discover just how badly Windows sucks for hardware support out-of-the-box.
But boy does that sound like a you problem. Most Windows machines, even those of technology impaired people, doesn't break that often. Mine haven't done so in over 15 years.
I mean I don't, but it's also been like a decade since I last borked my Linux install. Because I read instructions, and outputs, and don't blindly copy-paste commands, etc. etc.
Ah, the hazards of dd. The disk destroyer has been earned legitimately many times. I did it to myself once because I got cocky and failed to treat it with the proper fear and respect.
I use NixOS and I borked Gnome cusors by having Hyprland installed also. Not everything can be rollbacked but you can easily reinstall NixOS on a USB if you have to which is what I'm doing right now.
A phone is often sufficient for googeling, but if you have ssh it's nice with a secondary computer. Recovered from crashes where no input works so many times.
The existing computer can serve as the "second" if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven't borked the hardware).
Yes, it's a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it's all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.
Lmao. I thought I was the only one. I have like 5 USB sticks with 5 different distros on them all tested and working. I also have a laptop with bazziteOS so the chance of it breaking to no return is very slim. That way, I can fix my desktop if it breaks.
Ventoy makes it easy. Create a bootable stick/sd once, and you can copy as many .iso files to it as you want. At boot, ventoy lets you select the specific .iso you want to boot.
Nah now you just switch to a TTY with a bunch of sick Rust terminal tools, or if its really borked you boot into recovery mode and mount the old filesystem and do magic spells at the filesystem until it works.
That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.
One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn't have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.
To me it was vital to have my phone in order to tether the Internet to my computer while trying to find a way to make my "Linux compatible" wifi antenna work.
Tether, try something, stop tethering, rinse and repeat for a whole day
or did you fail grub? grub is always your friend. unlike cocky systemd not even requiring the kernel to be on laaarge efi partition.
and can you rice systemd? noes...but grub.
but ofcourse systemd is "easier", like the iphone or using ai slob.
so it depends on which direction you want your life to go...
I don't quite remember when or of it's grubs fault or arch but in 2021/22, I remember I had to regenerate it's config for it to work and it was not just ke but everyone else doing it too. Also you can't use secure boot with riced grub.
I have a small partition that has a copy of Linux Mint live USB. I also have another partition that holds my backups. When I inevitably break my system, I launch Mint and use an rsync command I keep in a text file to revert back to the backup I made.
Using Mint's live usb image has multiple benefits. It has Gparted for partition management. It has basic apps like LibreOffice and Mozilla in case I need them. It has proper printer support too. And since it's a live usb image, every time I launch it, the environment will always be the same. No changes are permanent and will disappear after a reset.
My days of using Mint may be over, but it's too reliable to ever truly leave my system.
Until you need a third running an entirely different distribution or OS
I had two laptops both set up very similarly, both Thinkpads on LMDE and running Tailscale.
Something broke my network setup on both of these laptops within the same day and it turned out to be Tailscale DNS conflicting with some other Linux network service, but I only learned that after using my phone to look online
Make a habit to use timeshift or similar backup utility if you continue "exercising your skills". Those allow you to roll back to last known good config.
Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.
It is definitely the case that I've had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I've also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn't an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).
It's funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren't so crippled. Similarly, you weren't so crippled if you couldn't use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.
These days, it's pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube -- obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat -- same problem.
Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.
Or Arch with snapper and either refind-btrfs or grub-btrfs.
This is a solved problem; on some distros it's not even an optional install; it's just set up automatically.
Before refind-btrfs, I used my phone to download and burn rescue ISOs on demand, because it had become so infrequent a need. The last time I broke my system was replacing the root NVMe with a larger one; I dd'ed the old onto the new and missed a UUID change. It must have been a half dozen years since the previous time.
My systems got a lot more stable when I changed to a rolling release distro.
It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.
Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it's a conf file for Xorg... but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn't, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
Thanks Xorg.conf
Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn't true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can't handle and you're out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.
You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.
My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me...
I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.
As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure...
Did this one early this year. Luckily I just made a backup of absolutely everything just beforehand.
So I just gave up, nuked everything with a reinstall and I was good to go.
Links2 saved my ass a couple times switching to Linux this last year, still a staple when you prefer reading on a real screen.
If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I'd have 4 nickels. "<.<
I've been there. I'm 100% sure my PC is now a brick, but I run across a post by some random person online:
And roughly five minutes later my PC is stable, purring happily, and two minor annoyances have gone away thanks to package updates.
Thank you all, kind Internet Linux guru strangers.
Edit: More like 25 minutes, really. 20 minutes of my reading docs to verify why this solution can work, and then 5 minutes for it to work.
This when my little dual-booting laptop would suddenly start in GRUB Rescue Mode because a forced Microsoft update hijacked the bootloader again. X_X
REISUB
Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
If I had a nickel for everytime I had to borrow a laptop to write to a USB, I'd have a nickel.
your phone? my phone only helps when websearching for stuff while my desktop isn't working or ssh'ing into my machine when the video output doesn't work
Meant in that sense, yes - searching for errors and their solutions as I see my computer having such major failures
Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
Changing graphics card configs in linux or editing fstab, probably
Luckily fixing fstab is pretty easy. I've broken it twice I think since I started using Linux full time about two years ago, and it's not really an issue. It takes a few minutes, but if you're remotely comfortable with the command line it's pretty trivial to get it booting again.
Had my server set up with encrypted drives and getting the root key from a flash drive. Cloned a drive and replaced the old one, somehow it was crypttab that just stopped working with me. Took like 4 hours solid to get it actually back up.
Lol I just had an fstab issue today where my computer wouldn't boot
Exercising my skills 😎 pls help
Dist-upgrading across 2+ years of upgrades.
It's been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved..
Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
Anecdotic evidence is anecdotic.
Correct. But usually it's spelled anecdotal.
Literally every time I touch fstab. I've also had Mint and Bazzite installs stop booting for no reason.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
I'm used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there's nothing you can do about it.
It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn't move, the clock wasn't updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it's also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn't addressing them.
Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
Removing /dev/sda1 alongside Windows partition I was dual booting
Forgetting to put the correct keys for secure boot.
I was dual booting, distro hopping to figure out what I liked & didn't like. After a few installs, I got cocky and thought I had the hang of things, and instead somehow deleted the bootloader, or something like that. Couldn't boot up at all to any OS.
I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it's not too hard to restore but still.
My NAS is one place where I wouldn't risk anything that isn't rock solid. Even if you don't lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.
Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.
Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.
I learned about the "nofail" option the hard way when setting up a headless server and typing the address of my NAS wrong.
This is me but with 20 days! I still had my usb from installing Linux (Mint btw) so I was able to just re stab my f.
I just manually mount my HDD now lmao. I'd say don't laugh but I still do.
That's what makes Linux so much fun.
All you need is a bootable usb stick
To be honest, you need that weekend with Linux too but it’s fun instead of dread, and you get to set it up in a whole new way
And the fix is understandable. The number of times I've had to fuck with Windows and never quite understood what I did that made it work, because you couldn't repeat it twice. Sometimes it was just the number of reboots you needed to do for it to uncross the turd caught sideways and suddenly work fine, until it didn't...
And a second weekend to actually make a working bootable Windows USB.
You can make a bootable windows USB in like 15 minutes using the media creation tool.
Way better than the old days of copying ISOs and muckong about with creating partitions on a thumb drive.
You're underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there...
Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn't threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
I always talk nicely to my computers. They're trying their best, and sometimes I have to accept their best isn't what I hoped for today.
The
dualitybinary of manYeah, that's when the threat of violence come in handy.
Bricked a laptop by trying to flash Coreboot onto it and forgetting to put my original BIOS in the build..
I had a spare parts laptop and reused the motherboard but still, big oopsies on my part.
Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.
I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.
In 2010 it was the smartphone? Not the dozen older computers, misc laptops, or even maybe a tablet lying around?
The sharp zaurus sl5500 with full color and useful in daylight screen was all the way back in 2004 for example.
Or the Asus Eepc in 2007 and it came with Linux!
I would have thought everyone would have access to a cheap fallback computer by then.
Yeah I'm assuming they didn't have any of those handy if getting a phone was what made it possible
Yeah. It just is really surprising the phone came first that late in computer history
I can't tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn't exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn't. I definitely wasn't packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.
Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would've been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.
I could've asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would've been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.
And so it's not that I think it's weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It's that I think it's weird to not understand that not everyone else did.
If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something.... anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.
It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn't you, thats cool.
To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.
But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90's and still pretty expensive in the 2000's. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.
That's why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.
I think you might be forgetting just how much e-waste was going on leading up to 2010. All the way back in 2003 I was using recycled computers for my Linux servers. Windows XP came out in 2001 and by about 2005 the number of Win98 machines being dumped was pretty high.
So I looked it up using the way back machine. I saw a flyer for my local computer store. You could buy a basic but complete computer NEW for under $200 in 2010. You also could spend thousands of course but you didn't have to. You could get a netbook new for $150.
So I went to some liquidation and used computer sites and old newspapers in 2010. A dell optiplex p4 at 2.4 ghz complete with 90 days warranty: $60. And it seems used is about $50 to $100 in general. Laptops a slight premium. And those are the ones people tried to get money back from. Lots of them were just FREE. The number of garage sale listings in the newspapers offering free computers is crazy.
And I mention all of that because Linux was how you took an old win 98 machine and turned it into a functioning web host, or email server, or NAS, or whatever back in those days.
And by the way, I think I paid $25 for my sharp zaurus used in 2005. It was so cool to have an internet handheld with color that you could use in full sunlight and ran linux.
Edit: I hope you see this! If you lived in Fayette county (GA) in 2010, you could get a Dell Optiplex GX280 P4 at 2.8 ghz complete computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard for $65, with free shipping. That should tell you something right there.
Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
How do you prepare the USB stick without a secondary computer? Or do you have one lying around in case of emergencies?
I have multiple lying around, because I'm also very forgetful. And also not only for emergencies, but mainly for maintenance, eg. editing/moving partitions.
It's definitely something you should have lying around for exactly this kind of contingency. That goes for Windows too, btw. Windows installations also get borked and having a Linux live system available can be a life saver.
I've managed MSP services and this is hog wash. In 6 years of providing Linux, Windows, and OSX I can't recall a single instance of windows bricking itself without kernel level software running in the background. And those instances are partition errors done outside of windows land.
You have to be trying to brick Windows these days to get to an unbootable state.
I on the other hand have multiple team members running random distos fuck up video drivers to the point where we had to wipe everything clean. And Linux computers were given out at a rate of like 1 for every 20 mac or osx machine.
So sure you could carry this around at all times but it's not going to be helpful for 99% of users in reality.
My windows 11 bricked itself before i even got to the end of the setup process lmao
👌👍
So there haven't been any problems with Windows updates recently? I'm happy things are running well in your particular shop. But that's not the regular experience of every business let alone home user.
So what, we're just making shit up now? Windows computers bricking themselves in secret? Business across the planet dealing with Windows breaking on updates? What subset of home users are you claiming have issues with windows looking itself on update?
Not this vague bullshit.
There have definitively been multiple times windows systems bricked themselves on me without it being my fault
It's not rarer than Linux systems bricking in my experience. In addition, Linux systems tend to be a lot more fixable, but with windows being just a black box sometimes you're just shit out of luck and have to reinstall
👌👍 I guess the rando non technical users we support all day have more tech skills than you 🤷♂️
2025 and still having these arguments about the cons of Linux desktop. The only real reason it's as good as it is, is valve pumping money into it.
That's a big assumption about who I am, what I do, and my abilities, isn't it?
You don't know everything, and your experiences aren't universal, you know
I have a half dozen of them setup. Any external drive that I use for copying files first gets built with Ventoy and some images.
Nahh. Just use a live boot of the distro of your choice.
Only Arch doesn't make sense though. Livebooting Debian KDE for Gparted is easier than working with fdisk etc. to eg. move a partition.
Depends on how you break it. Broken partitions? Sure, Gparted it is. Everything else? Most often can be fixed with a quick
arch-chrootand then undoing whatever caused the mess.So yeah, I agree with the Ventoy suggestion. Such a neat little tool that it's earned it's place on my key-chain.
It really depends. I like using live boot arch since it just gets me into a shell that I can chroot with really fast and I don’t have to worry about any graphical elements coming into play. Of course if it is something like a laptop then that is a totally different story.
Generally though I keep luks encrypted usb drive with a full install with most everything you would need for those situations complete with a fully set up and remote managed environment over tailscale so I can keep my preferences up to date and even remote in from another device of my choice. It makes the whole recovery process suck a whoooole lot less.
My only issue with this is, I think I have had very low quality USB sticks that get corrupted putting Ventoy on them tbh.
Same. Though I moved to a 30€ 256GB USB-A + USB-C stick, which is more than enough for my ISOs and very quick to write on. And I hope it withstands a lot of write cycles too.
Can't praise ventoy enough. Brilliant little piece of kit.
I unironically keep a tiny linux mint boot usb key on my keychain.
When I feel bad about myself, I remember that I have that on my keychain, and I think I can't be that much of a failure because that's pretty cool.
Hey, I'm impressed
Id do the same thing! I JB welded a USB stick on my conceal carry so when I screw up my boot loader I can sigh and whip out my gun and put it in my computer.
Unrelated, I'm banned from public libraries statewide.
To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren't counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol
I'll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren't actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn't know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
Also,
Windows is a mature, established OS, it is perfectly capable of breaking on it's own without the user's input
Look what kind of OS would not just break by siiting their without imput
Built into the firmware on macs lol
Back when all I had was one computer with Linux and I got in trouble I had a bootable USB stick so I could load up a browser and search forums for a solution.
Commonly referred to as a "smartphone"
Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.
However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn't have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.
Did your bootloader ever fail you? Now how do you debug that?
With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.
There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.
You know for a bunch of tech-savvy people you all seem to fuck up your installs a lot.
Linux can be booted from a USB drive, Windows is deliberately designed to be easy to install and takes less than an hour, and nobody's installing MacOS anyway.
I reckon it's because you can't resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don't mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.
this is such a fire line. I once shared how I nuked my first distro by deleting all the dependencies of VLC while trying to reinstall VLC... then someone replied "wait wouldn't just running the 'install VLC' command reinstall all the dependencies and get it back to normal?"
where was that person like a year ago 😭 I wasted so much time just to give up in the end
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.That's partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I've had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don't even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it's called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂
Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn't booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don't get me started on the keyrings when you don't update for a while.
Phew, so I'm not alone? 😂
Windows is such a pain to install though. It won't work with some of the tools used to make a bootable usb stick. It takes forever to install and then you still have to set up a bunch of drivers. And then you have to install a ton of software by hunting for exe files online. Not to mention the dance you need to do to even be allowed to install it offline, without using a Microsoft account.
20 years ago linux didn't run on laptops at all. In the interim, it was very unstable. I reckon that linux still doesn't run on many laptops -- I don't know, I was scared straight so I get a lenovo everytime; never fails to run linux.
I had Linux on my laptop 20 years ago. The SD card reader didn't work, and it couldn't sleep (was sleep a thing for any laptop back then? I can't remember). It did work though!
even today my lenovo doesn't sleep >_>
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
Put a distro on a flash drive. Throw the flash drive in a drawer. If computer break, retrieve flash drive. There’s your spare computer. Now try doing that with windows.
That's not fair. You can make bootable Linux flash drives in Windows too.
No. You have a barely functioning windows environment when using hirens that’s only useful for very specific things. Linux can boot off a flash drive and do literally anything a full install can do.
You can boot windows of an usb stick. You can create that with rufus. I tried it out of curiosity and it actually works.
I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.
I've been using linux since last December and I haven't majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It's not 2003 anymore.
You are. You are supposed pretend, everything you know on Windows should immediately transfer to Linux. Try to do techie things on Linux the Windows way; borking your system. Finally claim Linux isn't ready for the average user, despite not using Linux like an average user would.
You're certainly doing Linux! I've only had one bad break, but i had a backup (if you mess with f-stab, save a copy it before you do anything)
I guess I take that back, there was 1 time that I did mess up fstab and had to boot live and fix it. But that wasn't too bad.
openSUSE Tumbleweed (and any other distros that take advantage of BTRFS and snapshots) is what made me love Linux.
I've always used Windows, but wanted to move to Linux as it is more in line with what I feel about computers, and openSUSE made that a reality for me. Fuck something up by doing what you thought was going to be a normal operational moment? No biggie! For example, sudo snapper rollback 333, and I'm back up and running after reboot. Has literally saved me and the distro a few times now.
Needless to say, I love Windows (for what it is, hate M$ though) but I am a full Linux convert now. When I log into Linux, it feels like home. When I log into Windows, it feels like someone else's home. :P
Fellow Tumbleweed lover here for all the same reasons!
This distro has been fantastic. A few times there's been some growing pains (8/10 of those directly being Nvidia's fault by my estimation), but Snapper rollbacks have been ultra reliable in getting to "known working state" until stuff gets sorted out.
It's such an unbelievably sane and sturdy rolling release. I also appreciate YAST and how it feels like they put effort into making pro-security choices by default without interfering with the user's experience too much.
I'm stuck (probably not, though) on an old tumbleweed version because something in my networking setup gets borked when I upgrade on a headless server I have running (I know, tumbleweed isn't for servers, this is why). I just reverted to the snapshot it made before upgrading and bam, like nothing happened.
I should get that worked out, but it works fine, so...
Hey there! Isn't MicroOS for servers? It's still openSUSE, but specifically for servers. I could be wrong though! :)
I don't think it's specifically for servers, it's just their immutable distro. I tried it out a smidge on my cheap laptop, it was interesting. My laptop only has 32gb, so anything immutable really wasn't a good fit for it. I wasn't really a big fan of everything I add to it being flatpaks, either.
I think I have enough experience with Linux at this point that an immutable distro is more of an inconvenience to me. I don't think it would have saved me from my predicament any more than using a non-rolling distro, since this is an OS update, not anything to do with anything I did. Really my biggest setback is that this server is working just fine, so my laziness is letting me not spend a few hours to redo it right and I'm pretty sure I could just run yast and reconfigure the networking and be fine. It really was just going to be a practice/dev server so I could see if I could set things up in an environment that didn't have many handholding tutorials, the leap server it was dev for ended up moving to Debian because it started running things that I actually wanted to be sure were stable. In my infinite wisdom, this one took over the leap server's job without changing the OS.
Really, I could have just swapped drives since I was rebuilding in Debian anyway, but Homie don't play like dat.
Haha! Thank you for the explanation! I never looked into MicroOS, because I heard of Tumbleweed and wanted to give it a go since I tried one distro (it has been so long I can't even remember right now) and didn't like it too much.
Yeah, when things are working, and it might take a day or so to setup something else completely, I definitely understand your hesitation! :)
Yes! I've used quite a few of the most recommended for newbies distros, and none compare (in my experience, at least) to Tumbleweed, and that's not even a "noob friendly" distro apparently!
Like you, I had issues when installing my new graphics card. Took a few days of rolling back before I found out the correct way to install their new "open-driver" variant. Been smooth sailing since, but I also haven't zypper dup since then out of fear of it all going away again. :P
Lads and lassies and everything between, it is best to make a full snapshot of your working distro BEFORE doing anything crazy like installing new drivers. TRUST ME!
That's what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can't switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It's rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I'm sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.
Forgive my dumb ass for asking an easily googleable question;
What is tty?
TTY is short for Teletypewriter. Basically it is the terminal that you see if you don't boot into a graphical environment. You can access the TTY from anywhere by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-7 (will throw you into tty 1,2,...7, depending on which F key you pressed) You can switch between TTYs either by pressing CTRL+ALT+,F? again, where the F-key determins on which TTY you will land, or by using CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to go back and forth one at a time.
The TTY is a terminal so you can do stuff like run commands here. If your graphical environment is broken, you will probably end up here and can often fix the problem.
Oooh! I see, thank you!
Yesterday, I tried booting into Wayland on Linux Mint, and I got NOTHING.
I rebooted and got nothing again. I tried the Ctrl+alt+F(x) key combo, but that didn't work either. From your explanation, it sounds like I should've been able to at least get a terminal for that, but it didn't seem to work. Could that be because graphically, it WAS displaying something after all?
Ended up unplugging the screens from the GPU and tried plugging it straight into the mobo instead, and it ended up working after all.
Hmm... What does nothing mean exactly? Did your monitor turn on during boot? If so, did it turn off again at some point or did it display a completely black image?
Since the mobo connection worked (which usually uses the integrated GPU chip on your CPU as far as I know), maybe it was an issue with your gpu? Or the connector or something?
I once had a broken setup where got stuck on a black screen, unable to switch to a tty. If I started spamming CTRL+ALT+Fsomething right after Grub was done, I managed to escape the black screen before it appeared, maybe you could try spamming the key combo early on and see if that opens a tty for you. If that is the case then you can be pretty certain that the problem is related to your desktop environment.
Alright, I've managed to open the TTY when trying to boot into Mint(wayland). You were right! It's probably an issue with my nvidia drivers. I'll see what I can do. Thanks
Nice! Since your installation is showing similar symptoms to my installation when I updated my nvidia drivers a while ago, I'm just gonna tell you how I fixed my issue on my computer, and maybe it's gonna work for you too. If you want, you can try this:
Boot your PC. After your Motherboard is done showing its logo or whatever it shows, you should see grub. If you press 'e' before grub proceeds to boot into linux, you will be thrown into a simple editor that will let you temporarily change what grub boots. There is a line with the kernel image and arguments, it probably starts with 'linux'. Go to the end of the line (line might span multiple rows, so end of line might be on the next row) and add this:
Then press F10 to boot. That's it.
This fixed the issue for me. If it will fix the issue for you as well, you can consider adding it to your kernel parameters permanently or making sure the nvidia kernel module gets the parameter by other means.
Hope this helps!
**I appreciate the help immensely. ** First thing I needed to do was figure out how to get grub to show, and to do that, I changed a file in /etc/default/grub to have the menu style be "menu" instead of "hidden".
Second I tried adding the nvidia_drm.fbdev=0, but it would boot directly into the default version of Mint (x11). I then had to disable auto-login in the lightdm.conf found in /etc/lightdm/
After that, I finally booted into Wayland again after adding the temporary parameters and... I get a black screen again, sadly. At least the TTY works so I can get out, no problem.
I did a bunch more tinkering that I found online, but after a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing, I went back to x11, only to realize that the driver manager was well and truly messed up. Could not get it to start at all. Ended up feeling pretty happy I took a snapshot of the system before I started all this, cause I could just rollback everything and now it works like before. (Still no wayland though, but whatever :P )
Interesting. I'll see if I can figure something out.
Answering your question, it booted to a black screen. The screen was "on", it wasn't complaining about not recognising a signal or anything, so SOMETHING must've transmitted. I'll try spamming some keys to see if I get a reaction. Thanks for the tip
Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It's been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.
I am a teacher by trade, so I absolutely love helping others. I'll absolutely pass it forward! This is also how you build a healthy community, I think :D
Tbf this would be the same on windows (well, if there was a fix other than reinstall...), unless you just already know the fix, which then would be the same on linux, you just don't know it yet.
Besides, since windows only fix would be to reinstall, no second pc needed, just keep the installation drive and treat it like a windows reinstall, bam same same.
Meh, safe mode with networking is pretty reliable about getting you back online (as long as you aren't using WiFi).
Plus, this complaint kinda loses it's validity when I have 3 computers on my desk, and most people have at least 1 in their pocket at all times.
Yeah, im kinda young and grew up with a smartphone in my pocket so this seems like a non issue to me. I guess some people who aren't as old still think landlines are the hot new thing?
Unless you fucked the bootloader
Lots of Windows machines come with the OS preinstalled but no install media, you will need another computer in that case.
You can make a recovery disk or whatever it's called.
Sure, if you think to do so before your computer doesn't work
Well yeah, duh. But you can go it in any working install.
To a slightly lesser extent, that's also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn't, it's downright impossible.
At least Linux usually has some useful error messages. On Windows, you get a fucking "Error Code
0x0000000f" and looking it up usually leads to some confidently incompetent layperson telling the OP to make sure their drivers are updated, or someone who managed to trick Microsoft into giving them a title of "assistant" on the official forum suggesting Windows Diagnostics like that's ever done anything useful, and at that point I just wanted to fucking die.I'll take a fucked-up xorg.conf over that clown show.
To be fair a lot of the time a blue screen is shitty drivers…
Blue screens are usually a defense against shitty code fucking over the hardware.
It halts the entire computer to prevent the hardware from being damaged.
I don't know what Linux does to prevent that, but I hope it has something similar.
The Linux equivalent is a kernel panic
I had a BSoD on Windows that googling said "could be hardware or software related". Thanks, I guess. Nothing in the logs even suggested anything happened except the several hours gap between other useless logs.
Have you had severe fuckups yearly with Windows, or Linux?
I've had bi-yearly severe fuckups with Windows and have yearly (probably more) severe fuckups with Arch;
the fix to the latter is a thumb drive away, the fix to the former is an ancient ritual which the FBI is still investigating me for.
You mean as long as you pay windows tax by buying a new computer regularly and dont ask for privacy, free software, etc. :)
I've been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like "tore critical system components I don't need out from the install media" level of customized. A good chunk of the "modify windows for privacy" tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren't there on my install.
No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.
The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.
I agree that its common across all distros. I disagree on self inflicted. Its as if you didnt bother to teach tour kid to ride a bike and laugh at them for falling.
We're a massively diseducated population by now. Friends of mine complain when they have to use a file system instead of buttons to open files and are shocked that making an app instead is expensive.
Unfortunately most people are utter slaves of convenience, they'd gladly suffer 30 seconds of unskippable ads every time they open the start menu rather than re-learn how a different operating system works - doing the latter has a (potentially) massive ROI, but it is quite a big step, and that's what gets them
Its systemic. You cant fault them for it because it is the majority. That means that on average it is not possible and we need to address this.
I've never seen an ad in Windows itself. Not sure how people are getting that.
Just to be clear: while I've seen ads in one form or another in every (non-LTSC) installation of Windows 10 and 11 I've ever made, I'm not claiming that Windows 11 actually shows unskippable ads (in video format) when using the start menu
yet, that was a hyperbole.I just retired a 2012 Windows 7 machine that had never received any patches/updates.
Never crashed, never had issues.
I've run Windows boxes even longer than that.
Since Win2k, stability improved drastically. XP was another major shift.
Linux is like running NT4 by comparison (and NT4 was damn stable).
Ah riiiight! Which version of windows runs trains and airplanes again? Which version of windows runs on modern cars?
Tons of airports and train systems run either Windows 3.0 or Windows XP if they are recent.
They don't want to update because they have already encountered every problem that could arise ever. Which they know how to fix in mere minutes.
And upgrading anything would mean the entire business can't function during it. Afterwards you also have tons of new problems that could take days to fix since they don't have the knowledge yet. Which could endanger lives.
... modern cars run Windows? D:
Exactly my point. Every device on the planet runs linux, except a couple desktop pcs.
Phew, you had me worried there for a sec
Not modern anymore, but early Ford Sync was technically Windows...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Automotive
I will remember this, and I hate you
Because it doesn't, by a long shot?
Because for the majority of people the experience is reversed
I’ve never had WiFi drivers just broke in my windows laptop out of the blue. With Linux that happened more than once. And having your wifi drivers break when you are not at home is super annoying to deal with because you can’t get to the usual fix.
Try installing nvidia drivers on Linux and then report back in a few days
Windows is shit but it’s more convenient and reliable and works way more easily out of the box for 99% of people. This is not even debatable
And for the record I use all 3 major OSs. They all have their uses and Linux is great for a lot of shit but you 100% have to thinker with it way more than with other OSs.
WiFi performance is iffy, same with Bluetooth. We have a ton of data from the company I work it so it’s not even just 1 machine. It’s a few dozen.
The majority of people never install Windows at all, and even fewer install it using a generic Windows installer rather than the recovery image that came with their computer (with the drivers preinstalled).
If they did, they would discover just how badly Windows sucks for hardware support out-of-the-box.
I know this is Linuxmemes.
But boy does that sound like a you problem. Most Windows machines, even those of technology impaired people, doesn't break that often. Mine haven't done so in over 15 years.
learning that most people didn't have a "back up computer" was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT
A usb stick with a live linux iso is generally enough
Or an OS that can rollback easily (ie: Silverblue and friends, NixOS…) Unless you've mangled your bootloader. Then the USB drive comes in handy 😄
My setup got messed up once after a kernel update that went bad and booting from the live USB and running the recovery install fixed everything for me
Only problem was that I had lost the USB, but luckily I still had my Win10 partition I can't boot into and make a new one.
So it seems the lesson here is you don't need another computer as long as you keep another partition with a backup OS on a different drive?
asdf
This is true for any OS. If it's not working you can't use it to look up how to fix it. That's not unique to Linux.
Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.
As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.
Just use Tumbleweed or Fedora...or any other distro with amazing brtfs support.
That alone has saved me from myself more times than I want to mention.
Do you guys not have phones?
Assuming you're making a reference to a particularly bad E3 moment ... I hear that
I mean I don't, but it's also been like a decade since I last borked my Linux install. Because I read instructions, and outputs, and don't blindly copy-paste commands, etc. etc.
There used to be(there might still be) an Android app that turned your phone into a virtual flash-drive thst could boot Linux isos.
Had some utility if you didn't have anything to make one with.
Ah, the hazards of dd. The disk destroyer has been earned legitimately many times. I did it to myself once because I got cocky and failed to treat it with the proper fear and respect.
I use NixOS and I borked Gnome cusors by having Hyprland installed also. Not everything can be rollbacked but you can easily reinstall NixOS on a USB if you have to which is what I'm doing right now.
As someone that has run Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1998, I can confirm this as 100% accurate.
A phone is often sufficient for googeling, but if you have ssh it's nice with a secondary computer. Recovered from crashes where no input works so many times.
You can ssh with a phone
Oh yeah, I use juicessh, but there's also termius and termux for free.
Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?
I always have at least one partially built computer xD
I remember these tough times. Doing all kinds of shit as a kid and the resolution was just to nuke it all and start anew.
That's how I learned.
The existing computer can serve as the "second" if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven't borked the hardware).
Yes, it's a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it's all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.
In related news: When did you last make a backup?
I remember printing the gentoo handbook back in 2005 to have something to troubleshoot my install process.
Lmao. I thought I was the only one. I have like 5 USB sticks with 5 different distros on them all tested and working. I also have a laptop with bazziteOS so the chance of it breaking to no return is very slim. That way, I can fix my desktop if it breaks.
Have you heard about Ventoy? You can have 1 pendrive with all the ISO-s you would want. Currently i have like 10 distros on my thumbdrive.
Plus you could use the pendrive as a regular storage as well besides the ISOs.
I have that, too, but I don't have a USB with more than 32GB. It has a stripped down win11 and a Linux mint.
This was true for Windows as well.
please tell me there is a way to flash a bootable stick on a phone… a windows stick, on ios!
There was on android, but they removed it. Gave me a real headache when I needed to flash a sd card and the only reader was the one on the phone
Ventoy makes it easy. Create a bootable stick/sd once, and you can copy as many .iso files to it as you want. At boot, ventoy lets you select the specific .iso you want to boot.
Thanks for the PTSD.
Multiple backup computers. In fact I'm a bit peeved my oldest backup computer broke.
Nah now you just switch to a TTY with a bunch of sick Rust terminal tools, or if its really borked you boot into recovery mode and mount the old filesystem and do magic spells at the filesystem until it works.
That issue is not exclusive to Linux though. Try hard enough and you can brick anything. And sometimes you don't have to do anything at all to end up with a brick.
One time that I was really glad for having a backup pc, was when I build a pc with the first generation Ryzen cpu: The pc had no display output after putting it together. After wasting much time with double checking everything, I decided to do a bios update, which solved the issue. I couldn't have done so without my old laptop at hand. Moral of the story for me: always have a backup pc.
Can't relate, I do not use Arch.
Comically, my Arch felt easier to maintain than ubuntu.
To me it was vital to have my phone in order to tether the Internet to my computer while trying to find a way to make my "Linux compatible" wifi antenna work.
Tether, try something, stop tethering, rinse and repeat for a whole day
One does not simply Linux without having a stable backup computer. 👌
what? windows breaks and you need second screen... but grub never fails you. the meme is closed source propaganda.
Grub failed me 2 times since the last 5 years. I moved to systemd boot. This is systemd propaganda.
or did you fail grub? grub is always your friend. unlike cocky systemd not even requiring the kernel to be on laaarge efi partition. and can you rice systemd? noes...but grub.
but ofcourse systemd is "easier", like the iphone or using ai slob. so it depends on which direction you want your life to go...
I don't quite remember when or of it's grubs fault or arch but in 2021/22, I remember I had to regenerate it's config for it to work and it was not just ke but everyone else doing it too. Also you can't use secure boot with riced grub.
Your 2nd paragraph is just rage bait.
Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD
Happened to my wife yesterday. Some update broke grub.
I've seriously considered installing a small rescue system on all my devices.
I have a small partition that has a copy of Linux Mint live USB. I also have another partition that holds my backups. When I inevitably break my system, I launch Mint and use an rsync command I keep in a text file to revert back to the backup I made.
Using Mint's live usb image has multiple benefits. It has Gparted for partition management. It has basic apps like LibreOffice and Mozilla in case I need them. It has proper printer support too. And since it's a live usb image, every time I launch it, the environment will always be the same. No changes are permanent and will disappear after a reset.
My days of using Mint may be over, but it's too reliable to ever truly leave my system.
That's really true for any OS. There's always a helpful friend's computer or your phone.
Until you need a third running an entirely different distribution or OS
I had two laptops both set up very similarly, both Thinkpads on LMDE and running Tailscale.
Something broke my network setup on both of these laptops within the same day and it turned out to be Tailscale DNS conflicting with some other Linux network service, but I only learned that after using my phone to look online
Make a habit to use timeshift or similar backup utility if you continue "exercising your skills". Those allow you to roll back to last known good config.
Back when I first started using Linux, it was rare to have more than one PC in a house. Now I personally have 3 computers, a desktop and a couple of laptops, and a tablet, and a phone, and some old barely-working tablets and laptops in a drawer.
It is definitely the case that I've had to use one of the other machines when the Linux desktop had issues. OTOH, I've also had to use other computers to help me out with a Windows issue (though it wasn't an OS error, it was a drive that went bad).
It's funny though. Back in the day when I only had the one computer, I was able to troubleshoot issues with it while still using it. That was probably only possible because tech was less advanced. For example, it was possible to browse the web effectively using a text-only client. Back then websites were simpler and Javascript was pretty much non-existent, so if you were troubleshooting a graphical issue you weren't so crippled. Similarly, you weren't so crippled if you couldn't use GUI programs, because in those days almost every GUI program had a console equivalent that worked as well if not better.
These days, it's pretty likely that the info you need will be on YouTube -- obviously not very useful from a console, or a Discord chat -- same problem.
I got my new computer three years ago, but I still use the old one with Mint 18 on it for some stuff, and the Eee is in the drawer.
I had to get the arch wiki up in my ereader.
Well that was a problem in early '00. Lucky to have a PC at all. No internet at home and my freshly installed Mandrake, SUSE or whatever I was messing with booted to a black screen.
I reinstalled Linux a lot back then.
Amateurs. I can search for fixes while my computer is still broken!
(ctrl-alt-F1, ctrl-alt-F2, etc to switch to TTY, then
lynx ddg.ggto get to DuckDuckGo)This has been my experience, yes.
Or you can use nixos and boot into the last working configuration (assuming your bootloader is working)
Or Arch with snapper and either refind-btrfs or grub-btrfs.
This is a solved problem; on some distros it's not even an optional install; it's just set up automatically.
Before refind-btrfs, I used my phone to download and burn rescue ISOs on demand, because it had become so infrequent a need. The last time I broke my system was replacing the root NVMe with a larger one; I dd'ed the old onto the new and missed a UUID change. It must have been a half dozen years since the previous time.
My systems got a lot more stable when I changed to a rolling release distro.
Isn't that what the second kernel is for?
So true. I went to my live cd many times
Ctrl shift 2 + links2 still works for me most of the time..
i have a whiteboard where i wrote steps to fix common issuee with gentoo
Ubuntu for me
My second computer broke ;.;