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Naaah, bootable USB stick is enough xD
Can’t relate, I do not use Arch.
Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?
I always have at least one partially built computer xD
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 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.
I had to get the arch wiki up in my ereader.
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Ubuntu for me
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If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I’d have 4 nickels. "<.<
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.
Same, I once had to use EtchDroid to make a bootable USB drive lol.
I remember printing the gentoo handbook back in 2005 to have something to troubleshoot my install process.
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!
A usb stick with a live linux iso is generally enough
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?
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 😄
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.
learning that most people didn’t have a “back up computer” was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT
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
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.
