A big part of learning Linux is screwing up computers and starting over.
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I started nearly 30 years ago and cannot count the dead systems I have left in my wake. Just on the 2000-ish thing where Dell first offered Linux but it was inherently unstable after booting the pre-written disk image if you touched it, alone... So many kernel sanity failures...
I'm lucky to have only had one system nuked by a faulty power supply that shut down during a kernel update.
I usually just reinstalled back then. But I didn't get into it till the late nineties. Back when Ian was still on the list serves.
Unless you mean nuking the OS or borking the bootloader. Then yeah, countless.
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually killed a system, I’ve booted from UEFI shell manually just to recover systems. Back when I was using arch id just chroot into the system from a flash drive and fix whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
The "starting over" part is what made it take so long for linux to "stick" with me.
Once it became "restore from an earlier image", it was a game changer!
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I’m not sure I’ve ever actually killed a system, I’ve booted from UEFI shell manually just to recover systems. Back when I was using arch id just chroot into the system from a flash drive and fix whatever ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the way!
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it's functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
i broke debian on my plex server and said fuck it and migrated to endeavor because im more familiar with arch
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
It do be like that, at least for the first couple years, and typically with decreasing frequency.
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The "starting over" part is what made it take so long for linux to "stick" with me.
Once it became "restore from an earlier image", it was a game changer!
Tell me more
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Tell me more
Timeshift was a gamechanger
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They died for a reason, for yor growth
True, sacrifices on the altar of the God Sysadmin, and their divine mount Er'orreport
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Timeshift was a gamechanger
Timeshift itself borked my shit up. I had to reinstall all registered packages to fix its fuckups..
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i' -
Timeshift itself borked my shit up. I had to reinstall all registered packages to fix its fuckups..
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'While only once, timeshift destroyed my bootloader. Don't update and reboot before a meeting, kids
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
I used to have a side system with /home on its own partition precisely to learn different distros and setups. It makes it much easier having a partition which is retained.
These days, qemu is your friend for playing around with random Linux stuff.
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While only once, timeshift destroyed my bootloader. Don't update and reboot before a meeting, kids
My test of Timeshift was pretty simple and straightforward.
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Fresh install Linux Mint
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Install most of the main software I wanted.
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Do a Timeshift backup.
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Install some extra software I didn't necessarily need, but might want to use someday.
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Restore the backup from step 3.
Results: Everything from step 4 was still registered as installed, but almost nothing from step 4 actually worked.
So I brute force reinstalled everything in place, and haven't used Timeshift since. I'm perfectly comfortable using the terminal, and at worst a live boot media, to fix any issues that might come up.
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Timeshift itself borked my shit up. I had to reinstall all registered packages to fix its fuckups..
sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'I also can't get over the fact that it doesn't understand RAID or filesystems somehow.
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The "starting over" part is what made it take so long for linux to "stick" with me.
Once it became "restore from an earlier image", it was a game changer!
The starting over part actually contributed to me continuing to use linux tbh. Trying out a new distro, figuring out how to use it, and building a new user interface each time I killed my system kept me engaged with linux beyond its utility. It functioned essentially as a way to learn about computers and as a creative outlet. I don't fuck around and find out as much as I used to but I still swap distro every year or so.
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Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it's functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.
That also sounds like a good way to stop learning!
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My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
Bricking hardware is a form of enrichment for me.
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The starting over part actually contributed to me continuing to use linux tbh. Trying out a new distro, figuring out how to use it, and building a new user interface each time I killed my system kept me engaged with linux beyond its utility. It functioned essentially as a way to learn about computers and as a creative outlet. I don't fuck around and find out as much as I used to but I still swap distro every year or so.
It was similar for me, but not quite the same. The thing I hated was starting from scratch. I'm very much not a distro hopper. Back in the day, I enjoyed the challenge of trying to troubleshoot issues and get the system working again, and that kept me interested, but eventually, I'd hit a problem I couldn't resolve, and I'd have to start again from scratch, and at that point, I'd just go back to Windows.
Now, I still get to do the same thing. If I break it, I get to learn how I broke it and try and fix it, and I find that process compelling. But because I'm using btrfs restore points now, I don't get to the point where I have to start again from scratch. So I can work at solving it to the limit of my abilities, with confidence that if I can't work it out, it's not a huge issue.
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The "starting over" part is what made it take so long for linux to "stick" with me.
Once it became "restore from an earlier image", it was a game changer!
My game changer was circa 2014 when I broke something and got dropped to a basic shell and for the first time instead of panicking and immediately reinstalling I thought for a moment about what I had just done to break it, and undid the change manually. Wouldn't you know it booted right up like normal.
The lesson here: if it broke, you probably broke it, and if you know how you broke it, you know how to fix it.
