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Isn’t that what the second kernel is for?
Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?
I always have at least one partially built computer xD
This is true for any OS. If it’s not working you can’t use it to look up how to fix it. That’s not unique to Linux.
Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.
As long as your installation stick is a live image and you keep it around, it also serves as a mighty tool to fix things with google and chroot.
Just use Tumbleweed or Fedora…or any other distro with amazing brtfs support.
That alone has saved me from myself more times than I want to mention.
Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
I use btrfs on my NAS and it shits the bed about once a month. Thankfully I use NixOS (btw) and have working backups so it’s not too hard to restore but still.
My NAS is one place where I wouldn’t risk anything that isn’t rock solid. Even if you don’t lose data, the NAS is infrastructure that should always be available.
Changing graphics card configs in linux or editing fstab, probably
Luckily fixing fstab is pretty easy. I’ve broken it twice I think since I started using Linux full time about two years ago, and it’s not really an issue. It takes a few minutes, but if you’re remotely comfortable with the command line it’s pretty trivial to get it booting again.
Removing /dev/sda1 alongside Windows partition I was dual booting
Dist-upgrading across 2+ years of upgrades.
It’s been a long while for me, but some kind of dumb tinkering resulting in system death was semi regular 15 years ago. It got real bad when encyption started getting involved…
Updated Ubuntu over three or four LTS versions in the course of an afternoon several weeks ago - no problems, updated smoothly as fuck, machine (15 years old laptop) is running fine.
Anecdotic evidence is anecdotic.
Correct. But usually it’s spelled anecdotal.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
Exercising my skills 😎 pls help
Installing stuff, then looking online for a way to fix an annoyance, find a script to fix a StackOverflow post that vaguely matches our issue, only to break that thing even more. Rinse and release, ad nauseum.
Literally every time I touch fstab. I’ve also had Mint and Bazzite installs stop booting for no reason.
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.
In the era of ‘smart’ phones most people have what they need, other than the equivalent of a Windows installation cd (as others have said probably on a bootable usb these days).
But I think all of the user friendly distributions have a gui settings and package manager that isn’t inherently more difficult than windows straight out of the box (and is probably more straightforward). Macs are presumably marginally more stable due to the consistent hardware, but I have only ever had an issue with quite esoteric wifi and graphics cards, and not for a long time.
To a slightly lesser extent, that’s also true of Windows - severe malfunctions are less likely to happen, but when they do happen, fixing them is almost always an absolute clusterfuck, and when it isn’t, it’s downright impossible.
Nah i had severe fuckups yearly.
Linux has been for me what the biggest windows corporate bootlicker claims windows is.
Have you had severe fuckups yearly with Windows, or Linux?
I’ve had bi-yearly severe fuckups with Windows and have yearly (probably more) severe fuckups with Arch;
the fix to the latter is a thumb drive away, the fix to the former is an ancient ritual which the FBI is still investigating me for.Windows had the issues. Bsod, programs not working properly, games crashing, driver issues constantly, old games not working.
All gone with linux. Only reinstall I had was first month of having Linux i changed my desktop environment and riced it to hell. It just had bad performance and bugs.
If fedora update gets too far, just restart during restart and select earlier version to boot to. Insane how good linux is as an os.
You mean as long as you pay windows tax by buying a new computer regularly and dont ask for privacy, free software, etc. :)
I just retired a 2012 Windows 7 machine that had never received any patches/updates.
Never crashed, never had issues.
I’ve run Windows boxes even longer than that.
Since Win2k, stability improved drastically. XP was another major shift.
Linux is like running NT4 by comparison (and NT4 was damn stable).
Ah riiiight! Which version of windows runs trains and airplanes again? Which version of windows runs on modern cars?
Tons of airports and train systems run either Windows 3.0 or Windows XP if they are recent.
They don’t want to update because they have already encountered every problem that could arise ever. Which they know how to fix in mere minutes.
And upgrading anything would mean the entire business can’t function during it. Afterwards you also have tons of new problems that could take days to fix since they don’t have the knowledge yet. Which could endanger lives.
… modern cars run Windows? D:
Exactly my point. Every device on the planet runs linux, except a couple desktop pcs.
Not modern anymore, but early Ford Sync was technically Windows…
I’ve been running the same heavily customized Windows box for half a decade now. Like “tore critical system components I don’t need out from the install media” level of customized. A good chunk of the “modify windows for privacy” tools shit the bed because parts of what they want to flip switches on for better privacy simply aren’t there on my install.
No issues with updates, nothing bricked or fucked up even with me definitively using it not as intended.
The more I progress in my tech career (roughly a decade in now) the more blatant it becomes that the overwhelming majority of issues people have with computers (especially in the modern era) are self inflicted. This is common across all OSes and Distros.
I agree that its common across all distros. I disagree on self inflicted. Its as if you didnt bother to teach tour kid to ride a bike and laugh at them for falling.
We’re a massively diseducated population by now. Friends of mine complain when they have to use a file system instead of buttons to open files and are shocked that making an app instead is expensive.
Unfortunately most people are utter slaves of convenience, they’d gladly suffer 30 seconds of unskippable ads every time they open the start menu rather than re-learn how a different operating system works - doing the latter has a (potentially) massive ROI, but it is quite a big step, and that’s what gets them
Its systemic. You cant fault them for it because it is the majority. That means that on average it is not possible and we need to address this.
I’ve never seen an ad in Windows itself. Not sure how people are getting that.
Just to be clear: while I’ve seen ads in one form or another in every (non-LTSC) installation of Windows 10 and 11 I’ve ever made, I’m not claiming that Windows 11 actually shows unskippable ads (in video format) when using the start menu
yet, that was a hyperbole.
At least Linux usually has some useful error messages. On Windows, you get a fucking “Error Code
0x0000000f” and looking it up usually leads to some confidently incompetent layperson telling the OP to make sure their drivers are updated, or someone who managed to trick Microsoft into giving them a title of “assistant” suggesting Windows Diagnostics like that’s ever done anything useful, and at that point I just wanted to fucking die.I’ll take a fucked-up xorg.conf over that clown show.
I had a BSoD on Windows that googling said “could be hardware or software related”. Thanks, I guess. Nothing in the logs even suggested anything happened except the several hours gap between other useless logs.
To be fair a lot of the time a blue screen is shitty drivers…
Blue screens are usually a defense against shitty code fucking over the hardware.
It halts the entire computer to prevent the hardware from being damaged.
I don’t know what Linux does to prevent that, but I hope it has something similar.
The Linux equivalent is a kernel panic
I remember printing the gentoo handbook back in 2005 to have something to troubleshoot my install process.
Ive never had that happen on linux.
On windows though, it was once a year. And it wasn’t even anything I did half the time. When are we going to stop pretending windows doesn’t ask more if you to have it working properly?
I know this is Linuxmemes.
But boy does that sound like a you problem. Most Windows machines, even those of technology impaired people, doesn’t break that often. Mine haven’t done so in over 15 years.
If you don’t do anything with it, of course it won’t.
Know what? Neither will any system.
Because it doesn’t, by a long shot?
My computer and peripherals dont even work with windows without me going around finding drivers.
Meanwhile I just install fresh linux and they work out of the box. How is windows the better, easier experience again?
Because for the majority of people the experience is reversed
I’ve never had WiFi drivers just broke in my windows laptop out of the blue. With Linux that happened more than once. And having your wifi drivers break when you are not at home is super annoying to deal with because you can’t get to the usual fix.
idk from where I’m sitting linux is considerably more reliable, robust, easier to use, requires less tech work to use, is good out of the box, doesnt need me to manually start stupid ass drivers or find them constantly, doesnt restart in middle of work to update, does not steal your data and stash it in onedrive. Oh and my games dont lag randomly, crash and bsod for no reason anymore.
Try installing nvidia drivers on Linux and then report back in a few days
Windows is shit but it’s more convenient and reliable and works way more easily out of the box for 99% of people. This is not even debatable
And for the record I use all 3 major OSs. They all have their uses and Linux is great for a lot of shit but you 100% have to thinker with it way more than with other OSs.
WiFi performance is iffy, same with Bluetooth. We have a ton of data from the company I work it so it’s not even just 1 machine. It’s a few dozen.
The majority of people never install Windows at all, and even fewer install it using a generic Windows installer rather than the recovery image that came with their computer (with the drivers preinstalled).
If they did, they would discover just how badly Windows sucks for hardware support out-of-the-box.
It was definitely fun in the olden days when you fucked up your xorg.conf and you had to use elinks to try to look up a solution. At least nowadays your smartphone can be that second working computer.
Xorg.conf was genuinely something I never quite grokked.
I mean, I get it, it’s a conf file for Xorg… but in practice, either your X11 worked out of the box, or it just didn’t, and no manner of fiddling with the config and restarting the server would save it.
You could install other drivers and blacklist others, and that would get it to work, but touching the Xorg config file itself and expecting different results was like trying to squeeze blood out of a stone.
Back in the days when you needed to write your own modelines, that definitely wasn’t true. You screw up your modelines and X emits signals that your monitor can’t handle and you’re out of luck. It was very normal to spend a lot of time editing your Xorg.conf file until it worked with your monitor.
You must have come along at a time between fiddling with modelines being a thing, and Wayland taking off.
Edit the config was useful if you were trying to hook up a more unusual monitor that had odd timings or more overscan than a normal one, but it was definitely arcane magic.
Mode=50; RefreshRate= 50 Hz Mode=51; RefreshRate= 59.9999999 Hz Mode=52; RefreshRate= 60.0 Hz DefaultMode=51 FallbackMode=50Thanks Xorg.conf
Did this one early this year. Luckily I just made a backup of absolutely everything just beforehand.
So I just gave up, nuked everything with a reinstall and I was good to go.
Links2 saved my ass a couple times switching to Linux this last year, still a staple when you prefer reading on a real screen.
My ISA Fritz! ISDN card fucking killed me…
I could, and did, live with the terminal for quite some while, surfing with Links, listening to music and even watching videos. Besides the obvious open IIRC chat in one terminal.
But the Fritz Card was horrible to setup. I need to say, that it was ok, when it worked, but as far as I remember, I needed to compile the kernel with support for it and afterwards needed to configure some memory or bus addresses somewhere.As this was my only computer as a teenager, this was just a horrific experience. Cutting myself off from the information live line multiple times until I got it right.
Also setting up dual boot the first time was a fun adventure…
Happened to my wife yesterday. Some update broke grub.
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.
Can’t relate, I do not use Arch.
grub rescue>Thanks for the PTSD.
Worst case scenario:
ls
ls (hd0,msdos1)/boot/
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
insmod normal
normal
insmod linux
linux /boot/vmlinuz-6.6.6 root=/dev/sda1
initrd /boot/initrd.img-6.6.6
boot
