A big part of learning Linux is screwing up computers and starting over.
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Pretty much everytime I try to do fancy stuff with the bootloader I get pretty close to nuking systems.
Worst was my 1st UEFI system where I was trying to get rEFInd to show multiple OS to boot from... eventually gave up and went back to the warm embrace of GRUBI just had 8 titles in boot menu all for the same OS. 🤌
I know exactly what I'm doing. It's a dual boot system. -
Maybe 1 or 2 back when things were less stable, but any time I have used Linux in the past 7 years or so, and particularly since I started using Debian as my primary OS, I haven't had any problems outside of trying to get some windows applications to emulate correctly, and one time when I echo'd into sources.list with > instead of >>.
If you want shit to just work when you want and stay out the way when you aren't using it. Debian of whatever source is what they call stability. I've done rolling, and bleeding edge. It's all a constant pain. Becomes a job to maintain or bug track or check logs. I'll never go back.
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It's even better if your only internet connection is that computer you broke.
This is the nightmare of my last 2 weeks. Well 11 days.
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Never the kernel but just about every time I touch /etc/fstab I fuck something up. I've done that a lot....
I've messed fstab, passwd, and others up so many times. It's a stroke to fix it and not being able to use your system for days. Zaps the drive to even mess with the computer.
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If you want shit to just work when you want and stay out the way when you aren't using it. Debian of whatever source is what they call stability. I've done rolling, and bleeding edge. It's all a constant pain. Becomes a job to maintain or bug track or check logs. I'll never go back.
That was my thought as well.
Back when I was new to Linux, I tried a lot of different distros in virtualization for shorter periods of time, and of course ran into the issues that come with the cutting edge stuff.
Last year I wanted to install a distribution to my laptop properly as a test before putting it onto my desktop, and I came to that same conclusion because at the end of the day I couldn't justify using bleeding edge, because I couldn't really even name anything I NEEDED from it. Yes, it is fun to have cool, new things, and it can be a lot of fun to play around with in a VM or something, but I don't actually need any of that stuff for what I do on a computer day to day right this second.
After that, the answer was pretty clear for me as to what distribution to use.
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May I introduce you to my lord and saviour NixOS?
Knock Knock Knock.
We (Jehovah's Witness) would like to know if you had a minute, so we could come inside, and talk to you about OUR Lord and Savior... Linux Mint.
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Just did a fresh install after attempting to migrate from a proxmox VM to baremetal (turns out my mobo only supports UEFI and after spending an hr trying to convert I just gave up and reinstalled)
I just spent 11 days not using my PC. Your sweating after an hour
I was thinking about what laptop I'm gonna buy to replace this broken desktop. -
Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.
What about Rsync. Does it get love? Any snapshot is good if it works. Backups are the shit.
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My gosh this hits home. If only I could stop tweaking. It's always just this one little thing. Then another and on until it's so fucked I don't even know where to begin. But it's magical when she works.
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Funny I did not expect so many people that resist starting over. Next time I'll give fixing stuff a shot
It is more about being lazy.
In most cases, where you havn't destroyed your filesystem, you can just boot another Linux from a USB stick, mount your filesystems to /mnt, chroot into it, and then investigate and fix there.
See the Archlinux wiki, even if you do not use Archlinux, it is great: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Chroot
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Generally yes. My exception was the time i accidentally nuked python in it's entirety...
Well, that could have been fixed by booting from an usb stick, chrooting into you real system and either downloading and (re)installing the python package this way, or, if your package manager depends on python, download the package in the Live Linux and extracting the python package into your system, and then reinstalling it, so the package management overwrites your "manual installation".
Could be tedious, but less so that having to reinstall everything IMO.
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Well, that could have been fixed by booting from an usb stick, chrooting into you real system and either downloading and (re)installing the python package this way, or, if your package manager depends on python, download the package in the Live Linux and extracting the python package into your system, and then reinstalling it, so the package management overwrites your "manual installation".
Could be tedious, but less so that having to reinstall everything IMO.
Fair, unfortunately it was a work machine that i needed operational again asap.
Luckily i image my machine monthly, so it was fairly straightforward to roll back.
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Knock Knock Knock.
We (Jehovah's Witness) would like to know if you had a minute, so we could come inside, and talk to you about OUR Lord and Savior... Linux Mint.
Sure, ok, that's still my daily driver, it's incredibly stable (and no, it's not fucking outdated), but other than that it doesn't help so much against accidentally borking your system.
So in this context, I'm recommending @[email protected] NixOS.
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I just spent 11 days on a dual boot repair in fstab, passwd, loads of ecryptfs, amongst other boot and login issues. Before restoring from the full system backup after getting mad to finally want to use my PC. 11 fucking days almost all day in terminal. TOO many partitions and too many folders inside of folders to get to my ecryptfs files. I got so lost LSing around.
After it all though, and it was an aneurism and a half. I still want to finish my goal and reinstall my dual boot this time correctly aiming the folders correctly.
Might help to draw it out on paper
But, when you're done, you'll be the Encrypted Dual-Boot God !
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If you take the plunge and switch to systemd-boot it's worth it. It's the only boot manager I've tried in the last decade that feels like an upgrade from GRUB.
Maybe I'll try that next time...
I kinda feel loyal to Grub, it's been my friend for sooo looong. -
What about Rsync. Does it get love? Any snapshot is good if it works. Backups are the shit.
Snapshots let you very easily revert back to an older snapshot. They're relatively fast and lightweight.
You should have offsite backups too. Snapshots won't help if your computer catches fire, gets stolen, etc. Rsync is okay, but has a bunch of downsides:
- It only gives you a single copy.
- If the source data gets corrupted, the backup copy will also get corrupted.
- It's not safe from ransomware since the client has full write access to the rsync backup (and thus malicious code could delete the backup).
A backup solution like Borgbackup + borgmatic or restic is a better solution and solves the above issues:
- You can easily take daily backups - all the data is deduplicated so it won't take much more space (assuming you're not changing every file every day).
- Multiple backups means that if newer data is corrupted, you can just pull files from an older backup.
- Borgmatic has an append-only mode that only allows a client to add new data to a backup, and not delete any old data. This prevents the client from being able to erase the backups
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
Nearly always it's been during the live USB install of a dual-boot that a distro messes with the grub or installed grub to the USB disk itself. The fault lies with me because I'm almost blindly trusting the distro, but also with the distro for lacking proper yet succinct documentation during the install or configuration of partitions.
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
Not any moreso than learning any other OS. I'd just argue that it's the case if you're averse to research, reading, listening, watching, or just generally learning from others... or if you're delving into unknown territory
Personally, i'm a learn-by-doing type of lady, so I've fucked up my share of devices (I'm allergic to reading unless it's fiction), but I have yet to mess around in the kernel (it's on my todo list, for my LFS build which is TBD)
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