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learning that most people didn’t have a “back up computer” was when i began to re-think my career decisions in IT
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.
Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
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.
How do you prepare the USB stick without a secondary computer? Or do you have one lying around in case of emergencies?
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
👌👍
asdf
I’ve had this very experience with every OS I have ever touched. It’s just that Linux encourages you to experiment while the more popular OSs discourage experimentation by making it as hard as possible to get things done.
Getting a smartphone in 2010 was what gave me the confidence to switch to Arch Linux, knowing I could always look things up on the wiki as necessary.
I also think my first computer that could boot from USB was the one I bought in 2011, too. Everything before that I had to physically burn a CD.
Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
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.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
I’m used to (on Windows) occasionally having the nVidia driver break things so the computer blue screens. At that point, your computer is shutting down and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It was weird under Linux when I had an nVidia bug and the display stopped working, but the computer was still alive. I was able to SSH in and do a graceful shutdown. It was weird to watch because my display was completely frozen. The mouse pointer didn’t move, the clock wasn’t updating, but the windows were still all there. But, behind the scenes everything was working normally (bar high CPU usage because something else in the system was bothered by the display being screwed).
As nice as it is that Linux responds a bit better to bad nVidia drivers, it’s also annoying how poor the quality of those closed-source drivers is. There are certain kinds of bugs that apparently have been issues for years and nVidia just isn’t addressing them.
Can’t relate, I do not use Arch.
Comically, my Arch felt easier to maintain than ubuntu.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
That’s what the tty is for, or at worst a bootable thumbdrive, CD, or Floppy. If I can’t switch to a tty, I boot a bootable drive, mount my harddrive, and chroot my install. No second machine required. It’s rare that I fuck something up though. Rest assured it was some bullshit I was trying, zero to do with Linux itself. But I do remember Windows would just bork itself randomly for no reason at all. I’m sure Microsoft has all that resolved now, but man back in the day it was painfully often.
Forgive my dumb ass for asking an easily googleable question;
What is tty?
TTY is short for Teletypewriter. Basically it is the terminal that you see if you don’t boot into a graphical environment. You can access the TTY from anywhere by pressing CTRL+ALT+F1-7 (will throw you into tty 1,2,…7, depending on which F key you pressed) You can switch between TTYs either by pressing CTRL+ALT+,F? again, where the F-key determins on which TTY you will land, or by using CTRL+ALT+arrow keys to go back and forth one at a time.
The TTY is a terminal so you can do stuff like run commands here. If your graphical environment is broken, you will probably end up here and can often fix the problem.
All you need is a bootable usb stick
You’re underestimating my ability to brick things at the hardware level there…
Tip: if you used a hammer, you are installing an OS incorrectly, but if you didn’t threaten the computer with a hammer you also did something wrong.
All computers are driven by fear, that is why I always kick them when they make too much noise.
I always talk nicely to my computers. They’re trying their best, and sometimes I have to accept their best isn’t what I hoped for today.
The
dualitybinary of man
I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?
No, people like to pretend that using linux is hard for some reason.
It’s not 2003 anymore.
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.
To be fair, this is true for Windows and Mac too, unless you aren’t counting the simple scape goat of wiping and reloading lol
I’ll use the scapegoat of most people with Windows aren’t actively trying to do things that might massively break it, and additionally the vast majority wouldn’t know how to fix it even with a second device on hand and would get someone else to do it anyway.
Also,
Windows is a mature, established OS, it is perfectly capable of breaking on it’s own without the user’s input
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.
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.
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” on the official forum 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.
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.
