Having a separate emergency windows ssd fixed that concern for me
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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That's true, but it actually feels worse than it is because if it was Windows you couldn't fix it anyway, so you still needed a second computer so that you could keep doing whatever you do on your computers in your life.
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.
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=50
Thanks Xorg.conf
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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...
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If I had a nickel for every time my phone saved me from massive failures in Linux, I'd have 4 nickels. "<.<
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Tf are you people doing to your computers to break the OS?
Forgetting to put the correct keys for secure boot.
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.
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Exercising my skills π pls help
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.
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Literally every time I touch fstab. I've also had Mint and Bazzite installs stop booting for no reason.
Most recently a regular update borked my nvidia driver so I had to ssh in to revert.
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All you need is a bootable usb stick
With linux: all you need is a bootable usb stick. With windows: all you need is a bootable usb stick and a free weekend.
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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.
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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.
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.
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Or just a USB-Stick with ventoy
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.
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openSUSE Tumbleweed (and any other distros that take advantage of BTRFS and snapshots) is what made me love Linux.
I've always used Windows, but wanted to move to Linux as it is more in line with what I feel about computers, and openSUSE made that a reality for me. Fuck something up by doing what you thought was going to be a normal operational moment? No biggie! For example, sudo snapper rollback 333, and I'm back up and running after reboot. Has literally saved me and the distro a few times now.
Needless to say, I love Windows (for what it is, hate M$ though) but I am a full Linux convert now. When I log into Linux, it feels like home. When I log into Windows, it feels like someone else's home. :P
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Tbf this would be the same on windows (well, if there was a fix other than reinstall...), unless you just already know the fix, which then would be the same on linux, you just don't know it yet.
Besides, since windows only fix would be to reinstall, no second pc needed, just keep the installation drive and treat it like a windows reinstall, bam same same.
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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.
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 driversβ¦
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.
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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?
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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
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.
Question: do the backup computer(s) have to be in a functional state themselves?
I always have at least one partially built computer xD
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.
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The existing computer can serve as the "second" if you have a distro image on bootable media (and you haven't borked the hardware).
Yes, it's a PITA to have to go back and forth between bootable media and trying to reboot into the corrupted OS, but if it's all you have, it can work. And the distro on the bootable media might be all you need to make those repairs.
In related news: When did you last make a backup?