My crippled kernel count is around 6, how about yours?
May I introduce you to my lord and saviour NixOS?
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I tried to use dd with too much hubris once. I had to restore from backups (which ironically, I had made with dd). I’m usually overly cautious, but I was in a hurry.
I did this one a few weeks ago lmao. You think once would be enough. But I am a truly special being.
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So, when you say crippled kernel, do you actually mean you tweaked the kernel params/build to the point that it failed to boot? Or do you just mean you messed up some package config to the point that the normal boot sequence didn’t get you to a place you knew how to recover from and need to reinstall from scratch?
I think I’m past the point where I need to do a full reinstall to recover from my mistakes. As long as I get a shell, I can usually undo whatever I did. I have btrfs+timeshift also set up, but I’ve never had to use it.
Uhm, zero? With ten years of using Linux? What did you do to fuck up the damn kernel? o_O
It can be done if you mess with the initramfs.
The kernel starts everything else by unpacking an archive containing a minimal environment to set stuff up for later. Such as loading needed kernel modules, decrypting your drive, etc. It then launches, by default, the /init program (mines a shell script).
That program is PID 1. If it dies, your kernel will panic.
After it finishes setup, it execs your actual /sbin/init. These means it dies, and that program (systemd, openrc, dinit, runit, etc) becomes PID 1. If an issue happens, both could fail to execute and the kernel will loop forever.
Thank you for explanation :) I suspected something like that - mess up with some internals, you do have a chance to bring the thing down. Which is why I always have a bootable usb around before doing anything risky
It’s the same as learning anything, really. A big part of learning to draw is making thousands of bad drawings. A big part of learning DIY skills is not being afraid to cut a hole in the wall. Plan to screw up. Take your time, be patient with yourself, and read ahead so none of the potential screw-ups hurt you. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, reality is absurd, it’s fine.
We give children largess to fail because they have everything to learn. Then, as adults, we don’t give ourselves permission to fail. But why should we be any better than children at new things? Many adults have forgotten how fraught the process of learning new skills is and when they fail they get scared and frustrated and quit. That’s just how learning feels. Kids cry a lot. Puttering around on a spare computer is an extremely safe way to become reacquainted with that feeling and that will serve you well even if you decide you don’t like Linux and never touch it again. Worst case you fucked up an old laptop that was collecting dust. That is way better than cutting a hole in the wall and hitting a pipe.
So this is why I’m bad at drawing. I have 954 more drawings to go!
See that would be a good analogy if the fail was fun.
Making a shit painting is still fun.
Having to reinstall my OS because I ran pacman -Syu and now my computer won’t boot, and now I have to spend hours making things work again: not at all fun.
Having my server run out of memory and freeze up instead of having a sane out of memory behavior the day before a long trip: not fun
It’s also archaic, niche information. Do I want to learn how to make a kernel version that didn’t get installed right show up in grub? Fuck no. Do I want to google for the 100th time what command exists to register the encryption key for my hard drive in the TPM? Fuck no. What an absolute waste of life.
Linux isn’t “I cut a hole in my wall” it’s “my electrician only documented the wiring in hieroglyphs and now I have to reverse engineer everything to turn on a light bulb”.
Both, to the point it doesn’t boot, and just tweaking enough bugs that it’s easier to jist start over.
Reply fail?
I think we are using linux very differently. Mine is two and one of those was a dead ssd.
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!
Every time I install or configure anything, it’s done via CLI and added to a script. Makes setup a breeze.
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.
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
“Starting over” is how we learnt Windows in the 90’s too
Giving our computer ghonorrea by downloading Napster mp3s
I’d just re-install Windows over the top of the fucked up install normally. It was a bit easier to recover from, and a bit harder to fuck up
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.
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.
Tell me more
Timeshift was a gamechanger
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.
While only once, timeshift destroyed my bootloader. Don’t update and reboot before a meeting, kids
My test of Timeshift was pretty simple and straightforward.
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Fresh install Linux Mint
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Install most of the main software I wanted.
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Do a Timeshift backup.
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Install some extra software I didn’t necessarily need, but might want to use someday.
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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.
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.
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.
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I also can’t get over the fact that it doesn’t understand RAID or filesystems somehow.
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.
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)
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.
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.
👍 never had to start over
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
I wanted to give OpenSuse Tumbleweed a go yesterday, but the live USB got stuck at “Loading basic drivers” so I couldn’t even get to being able to install it.
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 ^^
Two. The first time I had nvidia related issues with nobara, so I removed nvidia drivers for reinstallation… And couldn’t figure out how to get them back. The second time I had used mint for long enough that I felt confident enough to nuke windows partition. I used gparted and nuked the whole disk instead.
Not counting the times I tried fedora and it killed itself with the first updates and then with multimedia codecs.
I haven’t majorly fucked up any recent systems (almost botched the steam deck once or twice but nothing that required a reinstall), but god 10 years ago I probably reset my arch dual boot like five times lmao
Another big part is learning how to set it up in a way that it’s functional and productive the first time and then STOP FUCKING WITH IT.
That also sounds like a good way to stop learning!
you can either have a system to learn on, or a stable system to work on.
Not quite. But sorta, yeah.
Learning to “not fuck with it” or ways to do so and rollback are valid lessons themselves.
Being able to segregate “production” and “development” environments is very valuable.
Being able to segregate “production” and “development” environments is very valuable.
This is a best practice that pretty much everyone, eventually, discovers on their own.
