True freedom means responsibility. You should have the right to destroy yourself and your OS
Definitely true when learning Linux, but to be fair, things do break on their own. Example: just yesterday I updated fedora and it broke my network connections for my vms. I certainly didn’t do that, and it seems to be a repeating issue.
But you wanna know what the difference is?
- A 30 second web search identified the problem and a quick edit of the network.conf text file fixed the issue.
- even if I couldn’t fix it, I could very easily roll the updates back
- this issue will get fixed for good and won’t still be lingering around for 10 years
Compare that to me updating win11 on a faster more capable computer a couple weeks ago:
- It broke like a bazillion things, well documented on the internet, no solutions other than “we’ll maybe fix that someday”
- the computer rebooted THREE times! 3! I’ve seen two-three was a new one
- it took 40 minutes on a 32 core threadripper, 64gb ram, plenty of free hard drive space, and a 4090 card. No, it wasn’t years of updates, and it wasn’t a major version update. It was maybe 1.5 months since last update.
Linux is great, not perfect, but great with great communities.
I’ve broken my desktop by running a pacman -Syu a few times. That was hardly my fault unless you consider my choice to use a rolling distro to be a fault in itself.
That tends to happen once in a while, usually because of Nvidia. One time happened because of GRUB update though I wasn’t affected that time since I was using systemd-boot. That’s not the reason I moved over to Void but gotta say I’m quite happy with the slower pace of rolling-release.
When something broken in windows, you can usually find a working tutorial how to fix it via GUI
In Linux however… Working tutorial…
HAHAHAHAHA
Archwiki? Linux administrators handbook? Countless other books and forums?
Ya I just went through this myself, long story short, never sync your home dir to nextcloud via the desktop client. Do the sub folders one at a time.
I curse Canonical whenever I have to use Ubuntu. #equality
Years ago, coming from Windows 7, I decided Linux Mint was simple enough to dip my toes into Linux. Some jackass had posted a guide to manually install a cool looking desktop environment and I fell for it faster than an idiot born yesterday.
Sure, the DE worked and looked cool for a day or two. But it was massively borked after the first security update. Looking back, I wouldn’t do anything different. I am grateful for that tough first lesson. After spending the subsequent days reading about the different distros, I picked one that was notoriously un-shiny and I read the documentation. Whenever I think about adding shiny, unsupported thingies, I think about how fast foolish decisions can tank the OS.
Linux Inc. does not spend billions of dollars ensuring you have no options but Linux.
It also doesn’t exist, so that helps too.
My favourite Corporations are the ones that don’t exist
One of the reasons I love Linux, actually.
Nobody to blame but myself, so let’s start figuring this shit out I guess
You can dig as deep as you care to, all the way down to source code. And if you can’t read code, you can learn to. If you don’t want to spend the time, that’s completely reasonable. But it’s your choice.
Yes, when something is forced on a person, that tends to lead to resentment. Meanwhile if a person freely chooses something, they may wonder if they chose properly.
Yeah every issue is basically a mystery that will lead you down a rabbit hole, be prepared to learn a lot of things and copy and paste code you do not fully understand, well if you are a layman like me
No, that’s pretty typical even for an experienced Windows admin.
Or just keep back ups and reinstall the OS.
Honestly I’ve been using Linux for like 15 years and there have been times that just reinstalling which takes 45 minutes would have been the fastest and easiest solution to a problem I will likely never encounter again.
My new go to plan. Thank you for the idea!
Timeshift or equivalent, love my daily backups and very fast restore plus 2 anchor points. Saved me a few times and the gf once so far.
When you go down the rabbit hole a debate starting from scratch again:
45 minutes to re-install the OS.
Another couple of hours to get all of the common programs you use downloaded and installed.
A full month or more of customizing everything to your preferences and downloading the programs you rarely use.
This is where Ansible comes in.
You completely skipped the “keep backups” part which prevents most of this.
If you have things backed up well that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes but yeah there is definitely an argument to be made depending on your preference.
I recently switched to CachyOS. While I don’t have the same hard-on for it that most users seem to have, I like how it’s set up by default to create a btrfs snapshot of the root filesystem before and after each update. Grub can even boot into individual snapshots directly. I’m almost looking forward to the day it saves my ass after an update breaks my system.
Oh look the fstab command I didn’t fully understand has written all the NTFS indexes over the partition tables on all my hard drives… Whelp time to learn data recovery.
I feel like fucking up fstab is a rite of passage
I don’t remember if I did, I probably did. But I definitely dd’d the wrong drive at some point.
To be fair, I prefer a GUI for anything that touches partitions: it’s much easier not to fuck it up.
Btw just a PSA: You don’t need to manually edit
fstabwhen there is Gnome Disks (gnome-disk-utility).
I mean that’s the whole deal for me. I can take it if I know I can fix it
There is no fixing microsoft
There is no fixing microsoft
But there is. People create their own fixes, configurations and utilities all the time.
By reverse engineering black box shit, then providing binaries everyone is just supposed to trust don’t also contain malware?
And those binaries are to fix the black box shit that is subject to alteration at any time, rendering them useless.
Yeah, because they usually don’t. One reason I started using Linux was that I started caring more about security. However, Windows tweaking apps never burned me.
Still
I just moved my EXT4 home folder off of my old Cachy install onto my new NixOS install on a different drive before decided to stick with just installing a fresh CachyOS on that same drive meaning a reformatting. I had meant to just copy the files so now I basically just nuked all my data :(
Mad at myself right now as I’m seeing if i can save any data using ddrescue and DMDE
I didn’t know you couldn’t just move an encrypted partition a bit to the left. Ended up wiping out the headers without backing them up.
All my data is technically still there, I guess. ¯\(ツ)/¯
See if the headers are duplicated somewhere else on the partition (at the end or somesuch).
“Oh maybe I could fix it by trying this thing.”
“But what if it messes things up?”
“Ah it’ll be just fine if I mess around here just this once.”
“It’ll work don’t worry.”
