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Can’t relate, I do not use Arch.
Comically, my Arch felt easier to maintain than ubuntu.
That’s really true for any OS. There’s always a helpful friend’s computer or your phone.
That second computer is called a smartphone.
Also, what are you doing to break your system?
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.
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.
I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
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.
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It’s not 2003 anymore.
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.
One does not simply Linux without having a stable backup computer. 👌
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.
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
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.
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.
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? 😂
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
deleting all the dependencies of VLC
You mean like
libc.so? Bold move, bold move.
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.
Lenovo is pretty reliable for that
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 >_>
I had to get the arch wiki up in my ereader.
If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I’d have 4 nickels. "<.<
Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
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
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:
"Press these keys, then type this exactly and hit “Enter”
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
If I had a nickel for everytime I had to borrow a laptop to write to a USB, I’d have a nickel.
Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
Can’t praise ventoy enough. Brilliant little piece of kit.
How do you prepare the USB stick without a secondary computer? Or do you have one lying around in case of emergencies?
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.
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.
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
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.
My windows 11 bricked itself before i even got to the end of the setup process lmao
👌👍
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
learning that most people didn’t have a “back up computer” was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT
