My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    Pretty much everytime I try to do fancy stuff with the bootloader I get pretty close to nuking systems. Worst was my 1st UEFI system where I was trying to get rEFInd to show multiple OS to boot from… eventually gave up and went back to the warm embrace of GRUB

    • flubba86@lemmy.world
      0·
      2 个月前

      If you take the plunge and switch to systemd-boot it’s worth it. It’s the only boot manager I’ve tried in the last decade that feels like an upgrade from GRUB.

    • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 个月前

      I just had 8 titles in boot menu all for the same OS. 🤌😅 I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s a dual boot system.

    • OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml
      0·
      2 个月前

      Knock Knock Knock.

      We (Jehovah’s Witness) would like to know if you had a minute, so we could come inside, and talk to you about OUR Lord and Savior… Linux Mint.

    • Sock Puppet Society@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      You mean why? Because you’re using your bare machine, you can use it as you wish. No nanny software limiting the fun or productivity

      • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
        0·
        2 个月前

        Yeah but breaking like six computers to do it, or one computer six times, seems like a pretty steep price for that when I basically just use my computer for gaming browsing and the occasional audio/video edit.

        • priapus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          OP said breaking the kernel, not the machine. The computers would be fine, its pretty damn difficult to brick a computer using software, at least by accident.

          Normal users will not break their kernel, op is likely doing some advanced tinkering. I have been using Linux for years and am definitely an advanced user and Ive broken my kernel zero times.

        • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.ukEnglish
          0·
          2 个月前

          Nah, if you’re installing something user friendly (ie Linux Mint just for an example) it’ll work 1st time, guaranteed - or your money back.

          But… you’ll only really learn once you’ve fubar’d something… just like falling off riding a bike

  • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
    0·
    2 个月前

    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…

    • mutual_ayed@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      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.

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    0·
    2 个月前

    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!

    • IngeniousRocks (They/She) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
      0·
      2 个月前

      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.

      • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
        0·
        2 个月前

        100%

        The alternative being variations on:

        Hi my name is [redacted], I have [X] years experience.

        Please run sfc /scannow.

        You can find more help at [Irrelevant KB URL].

        Please rank me 5 stars.

        Ticket closed

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
          0·
          2 个月前

          Timeshift itself borked my shit up. I had to reinstall all registered packages to fix its fuckups…

          sudo aptitude reinstall '~i'

          Edit: Sure it took a long while, about as long as a full OS reinstall, but never once was there any issue with the kernel.

          • Kairos@lemmy.today
            0·
            2 个月前

            I also can’t get over the fact that it doesn’t understand RAID or filesystems somehow.

          • bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
            0·
            2 个月前

            While only once, timeshift destroyed my bootloader. Don’t update and reboot before a meeting, kids

            • over_clox@lemmy.world
              0·
              2 个月前

              My test of Timeshift was pretty simple and straightforward.

              1. Fresh install Linux Mint

              2. Install most of the main software I wanted.

              3. Do a Timeshift backup.

              4. Install some extra software I didn’t necessarily need, but might want to use someday.

              5. 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.

              • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
                0·
                2 个月前

                Timeshift is a good piece of software doing a tired trick.

                The new hotness is copy on write file systems and snapshots. I can snapshot, instantly, then do a system update and revert to the previous snapshot also instantly.

                Instead of using symlinks files, like Timeshift, the filesystem is keeping track of things at the block level.

                If you update a block it writes a new copy of the block (copy on write). The old copy is still there and will be overwritten unless it is part of a snapshot. Since the block is already written, snapshots don’t require any data to be copied so they’re instant.

                Once you finish the system update, all of the overwritten blocks are still there (part of the snapshot) and reverting is also just a filesystem operation, theres no mass data to be copied and so it is also instant.

                It does use disk space, as allocated blocks AND snapshotted blocks are stored. It uses less than Timeshift though, since Timeshift copies the entire file when it changes

                ZFS and btrfs are the ones to use.

                • ABetterTomorrow@lemm.eeEnglish
                  0·
                  2 个月前

                  Didn’t quite follow what you were saying completely. Are you suggesting a new program over time shift or change the file system type like ZFS and Btrfs? I’m using Ubuntu and not sure if I seen those before.

    • ComradeSharkfucker@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      I could be weird for this but 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.

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        0·
        2 个月前

        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.

    • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Every time I install or configure anything, it’s done via CLI and added to a script. Makes setup a breeze.

  • circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    2 个月前

    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.

  • Dudewitbow@lemmy.zip
    0·
    2 个月前

    i broke debian on my plex server and said fuck it and migrated to endeavor because im more familiar with arch

  • floofloof@lemmy.ca
    0·
    2 个月前

    OpenSuse Tumbleweed helps because you can create a btrfs snapshot at any moment and then roll back to it if you get in trouble. And it does this automatically whenever you update the packages.

    • aizakku@waterloolemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 个月前

      Been looking for a DR system for Ubuntu or mint, need to look into it myself but would like some feedback if this could be the right ticket.

      I just bought a raspberry pi 4 to host plex, I’m sure I could get it to do backup and restore too. Looking into it

    • overload@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      2 个月前

      OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Gang. The only distro I haven’t been able to break after 6 months (well, I have, but I’ve been able to snapper rollback every time)

      • floofloof@lemmy.ca
        0·
        2 个月前

        It’s the first rolling distro I have tried, and I’ve been running it for about 3 years now without any real problems. I think maybe twice there have been updates that cause issues, out of hundreds of updates per week. It’s surprisingly solid, and everything’s up to date.

        Not everyone would want hundreds of updates per week of course, but it’s up to the user to decide how often to install updates. Unlike Windows, the updates don’t intrude, and they are fast.

        • overload@sopuli.xyz
          0·
          2 个月前

          It seems to hit that right balance of bleeding edge while SUSE are still testing the packages for a bit to ensure there aren’t bad updates. Fedora sounds interesting to me as well, but I’m not going to fix what isn’t broken.

  • dan@upvote.au
    0·
    2 个月前

    Once you break it a few times, you start to understand the value of btrfs or ZFS snapshots.

  • oo1@lemmings.worldEnglish
    0·
    2 个月前

    I always think of Kiwi / Ozzie slang when I type chroot.

    Of course that’s after consulting the ArchKiwi to remember how to mount it

  • Magiilaro@feddit.org
    0·
    2 个月前

    Making errors and analysing them to figure out what went wrong and why is a huge part of learning. You can only learn so much from theory, some things can be learned best by trial and error and the experience gained from it.

    When I started with Linux I did choose to use Gentoo Linux because it was the most complex and complicated option, so I had the most opportunities to learn something by ducking up!

  • bert_brause@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 个月前

    Recently I accidently deleted the contents of /boot/ on my first arch install. The lesson that followed was something I would have rather saved for later ^^