• Mikelius@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    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

    • Robust Mirror@aussie.zone
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      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,

  • TipRing@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    Me: I have been using Linux professionally for 20 years, I can edit fstab.

    Also Me five minutes later: I am glad I have live boot stick handy.

    • Cenzorrll@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I learned about the “nofail” option the hard way when setting up a headless server and typing the address of my NAS wrong.

    • Sidhean@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      This is me but with 20 days! I still had my usb from installing Linux (Mint btw) so I was able to just re stab my f.

      I just manually mount my HDD now lmao. I’d say don’t laugh but I still do.

  • nul42@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Back when all I had was one computer with Linux and I got in trouble I had a bootable USB stick so I could load up a browser and search forums for a solution.

  • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    I unironically keep a tiny linux mint boot usb key on my keychain.

    When I feel bad about myself, I remember that I have that on my keychain, and I think I can’t be that much of a failure because that’s pretty cool.

    • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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      6 days ago

      Id do the same thing! I JB welded a USB stick on my conceal carry so when I screw up my boot loader I can sigh and whip out my gun and put it in my computer.

      Unrelated, I’m banned from public libraries statewide.

  • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

    • AugustWest@lemm.ee
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      7 days ago

      In 2010 it was the smartphone? Not the dozen older computers, misc laptops, or even maybe a tablet lying around?

      The sharp zaurus sl5500 with full color and useful in daylight screen was all the way back in 2004 for example.

      Or the Asus Eepc in 2007 and it came with Linux!

      I would have thought everyone would have access to a cheap fallback computer by then.

      • irmoz@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Yeah I’m assuming they didn’t have any of those handy if getting a phone was what made it possible

        • AugustWest@lemm.ee
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          6 days ago

          Yeah. It just is really surprising the phone came first that late in computer history

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        I can’t tell if you were rich, or just not the right age to appreciate that it wasn’t exactly common for a young adult, fresh out of college, to have spare computers laying around (much less the budget to spare on getting a $300-500 secondary device for browsing the internet). If I upgraded computers, I sold the old one used if it was working, or for parts of it wasn’t. I definitely wasn’t packing up secondary computers to bring with me when I moved cities for a new job.

        Yes, I had access to a work computer at the office, but it would’ve been weird to try to bring in my own computer to try to work on it after hours, while trying to use the Internet from my cubicle for personal stuff.

        I could’ve asked a roommate to borrow their computer or to look stuff up for me, but that, like going to the office or a library to use that internet, would’ve been a lot more friction than I was willing to put up with, for a side project at home.

        And so it’s not that I think it’s weird to have a secondary internet-connected device before 2010. It’s that I think it’s weird to not understand that not everyone else did.

        • AugustWest@lemm.ee
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          If you were moving around sure. But most kids I knew by that age had something… anything. A used one for free by that point, maybe $50 at most if you paid.

          It was the juxtaposition of dirt cheap computers, being able to even afford a smartphone, AND taking a shot at installing a new OS. Usually that path was a little bit of geekery beforehand maybe ability to coble together a computer or grab a second hand laptop. If that wasn’t you, thats cool.

          • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            taking a shot at installing a new OS

            To be clear, I had been on Ubuntu for about 4 years by then, having switched when 6.06 LTS had come out. And several years before that, I had previously installed Windows Me, XP beta, and the first official XP release on a home-built, my first computer that was actually mine, using student loan money paid out because my degree program required all students have their own computer.

            But freedom to tinker on software was by no means the flexibility to acquire spare hardware. Computers were really expensive in the 90’s and still pretty expensive in the 2000’s. Especially laptops, in a time when color LCD technology was still pretty new.

            That’s why I assumed you were a different age from me, either old enough to have been tinkering with computers long enough to have spare parts, or young enough to still live with middle class parents who had computers and Internet at home.

            • AugustWest@lemm.ee
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              6 days ago

              I think you might be forgetting just how much e-waste was going on leading up to 2010. All the way back in 2003 I was using recycled computers for my Linux servers. Windows XP came out in 2001 and by about 2005 the number of Win98 machines being dumped was pretty high.

              So I looked it up using the way back machine. I saw a flyer for my local computer store. You could buy a basic but complete computer NEW for under $200 in 2010. You also could spend thousands of course but you didn’t have to. You could get a netbook new for $150.

              So I went to some liquidation and used computer sites and old newspapers in 2010. A dell optiplex p4 at 2.4 ghz complete with 90 days warranty: $60. And it seems used is about $50 to $100 in general. Laptops a slight premium. And those are the ones people tried to get money back from. Lots of them were just FREE. The number of garage sale listings in the newspapers offering free computers is crazy.

              And I mention all of that because Linux was how you took an old win 98 machine and turned it into a functioning web host, or email server, or NAS, or whatever back in those days.

              And by the way, I think I paid $25 for my sharp zaurus used in 2005. It was so cool to have an internet handheld with color that you could use in full sunlight and ran linux.

              Edit: I hope you see this! If you lived in Fayette county (GA) in 2010, you could get a Dell Optiplex GX280 P4 at 2.8 ghz complete computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard for $65, with free shipping. That should tell you something right there.

  • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • sunflowercowboy@feddit.org
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      6 days ago

      Only linux lets you absolutely decimate the functional capability of your OS from within with ease. That is absolutely a linux thing.

      • eldain@feddit.nl
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        5 days ago

        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.

  • aaron@infosec.pub
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    6 days ago

    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 beginner 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.

    • pedz@lemmy.ca
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      Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.

      However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.

        • pedz@lemmy.ca
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          With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.

          There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.

  • RedFrank24@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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

    • osugi_sakae@midwest.social
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      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.

      • TriflingToad@sh.itjust.works
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        7 days ago

        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

        • barsoap@lemm.ee
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          deleting all the dependencies of VLC

          You mean like libc.so? Bold move, bold move.

      • DonutsRMeh@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        That’s partially true and it depends on the distro. Debian? Mint? Absolutely. Arch/Arch based? Not really. And before some Arch brothers jump in to beat me up, I’ve had arch and some of its derivates literally break without me doing anything. Last one was Endeavour OS. That fucker broke to no return from an update. I don’t even tinker anymore. It just refused to log me into my desktop after the update. The plasma shell (or whatever the fuck it’s called) kept just dying before logging in because I was able to log in just fine in TTY. Moral of the story, I switched to another Arch based distro 😂

        • Opisek@lemmy.world
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          Just had to nuke my arch that I hadn’t booted in in a year. This distro has an expiry date I swear. I could no longer update for the life of me because every package on my system was conflicting somehow. Don’t get me started on the keyrings when you don’t update for a while.

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
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      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.

    • jsomae@lemmy.ml
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      7 days ago

      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.

      • Kevin@lemmy.ca
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        7 days ago

        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!

  • muusemuuse@lemm.ee
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    7 days ago

    Put a distro on a flash drive. Throw the flash drive in a drawer. If computer break, retrieve flash drive. There’s your spare computer. Now try doing that with windows.

      • muusemuuse@lemm.ee
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        No. You have a barely functioning windows environment when using hirens that’s only useful for very specific things. Linux can boot off a flash drive and do literally anything a full install can do.

        • doomcanoe@sh.itjust.works
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          a barely functioning windows environment…that’s only useful for very specific things.

          Sounds like a full Windows install to me.

          ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

    • polle@feddit.org
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      7 days ago

      You can boot windows of an usb stick. You can create that with rufus. I tried it out of curiosity and it actually works.

    • axx@slrpnk.net
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      6 days ago

      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 😄

    • wesley@yall.theatl.social
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      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?

  • WeebLife@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    I’ve been using linux since last December and I haven’t majorly broken anything. Am I doing Linux wrong?

    • highball@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • Sidhean@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      You’re certainly doing Linux! I’ve only had one bad break, but i had a backup (if you mess with f-stab, save a copy it before you do anything)

      • WeebLife@lemmy.world
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        I guess I take that back, there was 1 time that I did mess up fstab and had to boot live and fix it. But that wasn’t too bad.

  • highball@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

      • Luma@feddit.org
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        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.

        • Focal@pawb.social
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          6 days ago

          Oooh! I see, thank you!

          Yesterday, I tried booting into Wayland on Linux Mint, and I got NOTHING.

          I rebooted and got nothing again. I tried the Ctrl+alt+F(x) key combo, but that didn’t work either. From your explanation, it sounds like I should’ve been able to at least get a terminal for that, but it didn’t seem to work. Could that be because graphically, it WAS displaying something after all?

          Ended up unplugging the screens from the GPU and tried plugging it straight into the mobo instead, and it ended up working after all.

          • Luma@feddit.org
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            6 days ago

            Hmm… What does nothing mean exactly? Did your monitor turn on during boot? If so, did it turn off again at some point or did it display a completely black image?

            Since the mobo connection worked (which usually uses the integrated GPU chip on your CPU as far as I know), maybe it was an issue with your gpu? Or the connector or something?

            I once had a broken setup where got stuck on a black screen, unable to switch to a tty. If I started spamming CTRL+ALT+Fsomething right after Grub was done, I managed to escape the black screen before it appeared, maybe you could try spamming the key combo early on and see if that opens a tty for you. If that is the case then you can be pretty certain that the problem is related to your desktop environment.

            • Focal@pawb.social
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              6 days ago

              Alright, I’ve managed to open the TTY when trying to boot into Mint(wayland). You were right! It’s probably an issue with my nvidia drivers. I’ll see what I can do. Thanks

              • Luma@feddit.org
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                Nice! Since your installation is showing similar symptoms to my installation when I updated my nvidia drivers a while ago, I’m just gonna tell you how I fixed my issue on my computer, and maybe it’s gonna work for you too. If you want, you can try this:

                Boot your PC. After your Motherboard is done showing its logo or whatever it shows, you should see grub. If you press ‘e’ before grub proceeds to boot into linux, you will be thrown into a simple editor that will let you temporarily change what grub boots. There is a line with the kernel image and arguments, it probably starts with ‘linux’. Go to the end of the line (line might span multiple rows, so end of line might be on the next row) and add this:

                nvidia_drm.fbdev=0

                Then press F10 to boot. That’s it.

                This fixed the issue for me. If it will fix the issue for you as well, you can consider adding it to your kernel parameters permanently or making sure the nvidia kernel module gets the parameter by other means.

                Hope this helps!

                • Focal@pawb.social
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                  5 days ago

                  **I appreciate the help immensely. ** First thing I needed to do was figure out how to get grub to show, and to do that, I changed a file in /etc/default/grub to have the menu style be “menu” instead of “hidden”.

                  Second I tried adding the nvidia_drm.fbdev=0, but it would boot directly into the default version of Mint (x11). I then had to disable auto-login in the lightdm.conf found in /etc/lightdm/

                  After that, I finally booted into Wayland again after adding the temporary parameters and… I get a black screen again, sadly. At least the TTY works so I can get out, no problem.

                  I did a bunch more tinkering that I found online, but after a lot of trying and failing and trying and failing, I went back to x11, only to realize that the driver manager was well and truly messed up. Could not get it to start at all. Ended up feeling pretty happy I took a snapshot of the system before I started all this, cause I could just rollback everything and now it works like before. (Still no wayland though, but whatever :P )

            • Focal@pawb.social
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              6 days ago

              Interesting. I’ll see if I can figure something out.

              Answering your question, it booted to a black screen. The screen was “on”, it wasn’t complaining about not recognising a signal or anything, so SOMETHING must’ve transmitted. I’ll try spamming some keys to see if I get a reaction. Thanks for the tip

      • highball@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Looks like /u/Luma got you sorted. Awesome feature right? It’s been there for a long as I can remember. This is the best part about Linux. People who use Linux created features that helped them solve problems or made their daily work easier. And you can do the same if you are feeling motivated one day.

        • Focal@pawb.social
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          5 days ago

          I am a teacher by trade, so I absolutely love helping others. I’ll absolutely pass it forward! This is also how you build a healthy community, I think :D

  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • boaratio@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    As someone that has run Linux as my primary desktop OS since 1998, I can confirm this as 100% accurate.